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Nvidia and Eli Lilly say they will invest $1B over five years in a new Silicon Valley-based AI drug lab, aiming to speed up the pharmaceutical industry's AI use (Bloomberg)

A viral Chinese app called "Are You Dead?" that asks users living alone to "check in" with a button press becomes the top paid app in Apple's App Store in China (Financial Times)

Crypto custody startup BitGo aims to raise up to $201M in its IPO on the NYSE at an up to $1.96B valuation, selling 11.8M shares priced between $15 and $17 each (Prakhar Srivastava/Reuters)

Eddy Cue says 2025 was a "record-breaking year" for Apple services: December was a monthly TV engagement record, the App Store has 850M+ weekly users, and more (Alex Weprin/The Hollywood Reporter)

Michael Saylor's Strategy bought 13,627 bitcoin for ~$1.25B between January 5 and 11, taking its total holdings to 687,410, and boosts its USD reserve to $2.25B (James Hunt/The Block)

Meta appoints Dina Powell McCormick, a prominent banking executive and former Republican official, as president and vice chair, reporting to Mark Zuckerberg (Sara Fischer/Axios)

Ampere Analysis expects streaming services' content spend to grow 6% in 2026 to $101B, crossing $100B for the first time, and overall content spend to grow 2% (Max Goldbart/Deadline)

Ofcom opens an investigation under the OSA into Grok over the sexualized deepfakes of women and kids being generated on X and threatens X with a ban or a fine (Financial Times)

Global smartphone shipments rose 2% YoY in 2025; Apple led with 20% market share and 10% YoY growth, followed by Samsung's 19% market share and 5% YoY growth (Counterpoint Research)

Paris-based autonomous drone maker Harmattan AI raised a $200M Series B led by Dassault at a $1.4B valuation, and aims to produce 10K drones per month in 2026 (Mark Bergen/Bloomberg)

Sources and filings: Peter Thiel donated $3M to a group to beat California's wealth tax proposal, the first of several expected tech leader donations in 2026 (New York Times)

Meta says it shut down nearly 550K accounts in Australia to comply with its under-16 social media ban, including 330,639 Instagram and 173,497 Facebook accounts (Nasteho Said/Bloomberg)

CES 2026 report: AI, autonomy, and robotic products are still finding their way, country-level booths are growing, Nvidia underpinned much of the show, and more (Steven Sinofsky/Hardcore Software)

A look at claims from Google, HSBC, and others about quantum computing breakthroughs over the past few months that helped boost quantum computing stocks in 2025 (Richard Waters/Financial Times)

Investigation: Google removed AI Overviews for two liver health queries after experts warned about inaccuracy, but slight tweaks still trigger AI responses (Andrew Gregory/The Guardian)

CES 2026: how some companies are trying to make their AI products cute and relatable, from Lenovo's chatty motorized laptop to Sharp's ChatGPT-powered Poketomo (Chris Velazco/Washington Post)

President Trump says "we may speak to Elon" about using Starlink to restore the internet in Iran, which has blocked the internet since January 8 amid protests (Rachael Levy/Reuters)

A profile of China's CXMT, whose $4.2B IPO goal would rank among the century's biggest chip debuts, as the memory chip maker faces US and South Korean curbs (Wall Street Journal)

Chinese AI executives say China is unlikely to eclipse the US in the AI race anytime soon, citing limited resources and US chip export curbs as key constraints (Bloomberg)

Naver, the largest South Korean buyer of Nvidia chips, is pitching its AI cloud services as an alternative for countries reluctant to use US or Chinese services (Song Jung-a/Financial Times)

Despite projections of memory shortages for PCs and phones, producers like Micron will proceed cautiously in adding new capacity, mindful of past downcycles (Dan Gallagher/Wall Street Journal)

Qatar and the UAE plan to join the Pax Silica coalition on January 12 and 15, respectively, expanding the US-led effort to secure AI and chip supply chains (Jarrett Renshaw/Reuters)

A profile of SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell, who has worked at the company since 2002 and is known as a customer emissary and Elon Musk translator (Micah Maidenberg/Wall Street Journal)

Anthropic announces Claude for Healthcare to offer HIPAA-ready tools for providers, insurers, and consumers, and expands its life sciences offerings (Eugene Kim/Business Insider)

ATG, which is developing the AI-powered wealth strategist app Autonomous, emerges from stealth and raised a $15M pre-seed led by Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan (Geoff Weiss/Business Insider)

Tucuvi, which develops AI agents that check in with patients and escalate cases to human teams when needed, raised a $20M Series A, led by Cathay and Leadwind (John Reynolds/Tech.eu)

Instagram says there was no breach and it fixed an issue that let an external party send password reset emails, after reports that 17.5M users' data was exposed (Terrence O'Brien/The Verge)

Tel Aviv-based Torq, which operates an autonomous AI-powered security operations platform, raised $140M led by Merlin Ventures at a $1.2B valuation (Andrew Martin/Bloomberg)

Malaysia becomes the second country to limit access to xAI's Grok, joining Indonesia, over the chatbot's generation of sexual and nonconsensual content (Bloomberg)

Walmart plans to expand Wing, Alphabet's on-demand drone delivery service, to another 150 stores, bringing the total to 270+, covering ~10% of US population (Kirsten Korosec/TechCrunch)

Walmart partners with Google to offer AI-enhanced shopping, allowing users to purchase Walmart and Sam's Club items directly on Gemini (Jaewon Kang/Bloomberg)

Google unveils the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), a new open standard that lets AI agents work across different parts of the customer's buying process (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

Google is introducing new personalized ads in AI mode, powered by Gemini, which allow advertisers to offer exclusives for users preparing to buy a product (Cristina Criddle/Financial Times)

A detailed look at the Apple-TSMC relationship: Apple's annual spend at TSMC rose 12x, from $2B in 2014 to $24B in 2025, and once made up 25% of TSMC's revenue (SemiAnalysis)

Analysis: the AI investment boom represents ~1% of US GDP, roughly half the GDP share during the '90s dot-com boom and comparable to the mid-2010s US shale boom (Toby Nangle/Financial Times)

Documents and sources: India proposes security rules that would force smartphone makers to share source code, prompting quiet pushback from Apple and Samsung (Reuters)

A look at the history and rise of Markdown, which has been adopted across the tech industry in the decades since its quiet launch in 2004 by John Gruber (Anil Dash)

Investigation: Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps used two UK-registered companies to move ~$1B in stablecoins since 2023, evading international sanctions (TRM Insights)

Newly listed Chinese AI chipmakers Moore Threads, Biren, and MetaX had strong stock market debuts, but none has sales worth more than a tenth of rival Cambricon (Financial Times)

Analysis: global AI-related companies drove ~40% of benchmark convertible bond index returns in 2025, pushing the amount raised to $166.5B, the most since 2001 (Bloomberg)

Taiwan's data shows the US became its top export destination in 2025 over China, including Hong Kong, the first time since 1999, partly driven by AI tech demand (Hideaki Ryugen/Nikkei Asia)

China launches a probe into competition among online food delivery platforms, aiming to curb price wars that have contributed to deflationary economic pressures (Reuters)

China releases draft guidelines for governing online personal data collection, open for public consultation amid privacy concerns and companies' data misuse (Bloomberg)

A look at the global AI adoption in 2025; use in the global north grew nearly twice as fast as the south; the UAE leads with 64% of working-age adults using AI (Microsoft Corporate Responsibility)

A look at Tether's role in Venezuela's economy, which puts it in a prime position to aid the U.S. as it seeks to find funds allegedly stolen by Maduro's regime (Vicky Ge Huang/Wall Street Journal)

Malwarebytes: a 2024 Instagram data breach exposed information on 17.5 million users, including emails, phone numbers, and physical addresses (Jackson Chen/Engadget)

A profile of Grubhub parent Wonder, which has raised about $2B and is rolling out robotic meal-assembly tech acquired from Sweetgreen for $186M in November 2025 (Joshua Brustein/Bloomberg)

Morgan Stanley survey of audio habits in the US: 50% to 60% of listeners aged 18-44 reported listening to AI-generated music for 2.5 to 3 hours per week (Luke Kawa/Sherwood News)

Indonesia temporarily blocks Grok, citing the risk of non-consensual sexual deepfakes, becoming the first country to block the AI tool (Fransiska Nangoy/Reuters)

Stack Overflow's monthly question volume in Dec. 2025 sank to 2008 levels; revenue has doubled since ChatGPT's debut driven by enterprise tools and AI licensing (Claire Yubin Oh/Sherwood News)