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Techmeme

Self-help gurus like Tony Robbins, Gabby Bernstein, and Matthew Hussey are charging up to $99 per month to access AI chatbots that promise personalized advice (Sara Ashley O'Brien/Wall Street Journal)

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ASML hits a $500B+ market cap for the first time, the third European company to reach the milestone, after TSMC reported strong earnings; ASML is up 18% YTD (Bloomberg)

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WitnessAI, which intercepts employees' custom GenAI models usage and applies safeguards, raised $58M led by Sound Ventures, taking its total funding to $85M (Ionut Arghire/SecurityWeek)

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The Wikimedia Foundation says Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Perplexity, and Mistral joined Wikimedia Enterprise to get "tuned" API access; Google is already a member (Emma Roth/The Verge)

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Yield Sec: the top 10 pirate sports streaming sites in the UK, largely funded by ads from unlicensed gambling operators, had 1.6B views in H1 2025, up 33% YoY (Olivia Solon/Bloomberg)

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South Korea dropped Naver's and NCSoft's teams from its competition to develop its first sovereign AI model, as LG's, SK Telecom's, and Upstage's teams advanced (Yoolim Lee/Bloomberg)

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AWS launches European Sovereign Cloud, creating a new parent company for its sovereign cloud that will be locally controlled in the EU and run by EU citizens (Arjun Kharpal/CNBC)

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TSMC projects capital spending in 2026 at between $52B and $56B, up 25%+ from 2025, and forecasts ~30% YoY revenue growth in 2026, both above analyst estimates (Bloomberg)

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Scientists say that AI has become a powerful and rapidly improving research tool, and that whether it is generating ideas on its own is, for now, a moot point (Cade Metz/New York Times)

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Chinese chipmaker SpacemiT, whose RISC-V-based K1 chip is used in industrial systems, robotics, edge computing, and AI devices, raised an ~$86M Series B (Bloomberg)

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Appfigures: global consumer mobile app spending on Apple's App Store and Google Play rose 21.6% YoY to $155.8B in 2025, but app downloads dropped 2.7% to 106.9B (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

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Microsoft agrees to buy a record 2.85M soil carbon credits from Indigo Carbon linked to regenerative US agriculture; a source values the deal at $171M to $228M (Reuters)

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Hong Kong-based WeLab, which operates two digital banks in Hong Kong and Indonesia, raised $220M in equity and debt from HSBC, Prudential Hong Kong, and others (Denise Wee/Bloomberg)

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Blockchain-based lender Figure unveils the On-Chain Public Equity Network to issue, trade, and lend stocks natively on a blockchain, not as tokenized replicas (Kyle Baird/The Block)

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Source: Apple's Gemini deal is a cloud contract where it pays Google several billion dollars; a source says OpenAI declined to be Apple's custom model provider (Financial Times)

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OpenAI quietly rolls out ChatGPT Translate, a standalone website that currently supports plain text translations across 50+ languages (Adamya Sharma/Android Authority)

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TSMC reports Q4 net profit up 35% YoY to a record ~$16B, above $15.17B est., as it benefited from surging demand for AI chips and hit $100B in 2025 revenue (Reuters)

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Sources: China is drafting rules for Nvidia H200 purchases, limiting how many chips local companies can buy and requiring them to justify the need (Nikkei Asia)

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A source close to Thinking Machines alleged that ex-CTO Barret Zoph, who is returning to OpenAI, had shared confidential company information with competitors (Maxwell Zeff/Wired)

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GlobalFoundries agrees to acquire Synopsys' ARC processor IP business, which includes ARC-V (RISC-V) and ARC CPU IP, and integrate it into its MIPS business (Nitin Dahad/EE Times)

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Bengaluru-based edtech startup Emversity raised a $30M Series A led by Premji Invest, sources say at a $120M post-money valuation, up from $60M in April 2025 (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

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Alibaba links Qwen to its online shopping and travel services, including Taobao, Alipay, Fliggy, and Amap, aiming to build a one-stop AI app for its 100M users (Luz Ding/Bloomberg)

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CoinDesk data: Binance's spot crypto trading market share fell to 25% in December 2025, its lowest since 2021, and it is losing ground in derivatives trading (Sidhartha Shukla/Bloomberg)

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Project Eleven, which builds tools to prepare blockchains for post-quantum threats, raised a $20M Series A led by Castle Island at a $120M post-money valuation (Yogita Khatri/The Block)

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Thinking Machines parts ways with CTO Barret Zoph, with Soumith Chintala taking over the role; sources say the termination is due to "unethical conduct" (Kylie Robison/@kyliebytes)

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Fidji Simo says Barret Zoph, Luke Metz, and Sam Schoenholz are returning to OpenAI from Thinking Machines and the move "has been in the works for several weeks" (Fidji Simo/@fidjissimo)

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BREAKING: Thinking Machines has terminated its CTO, Barrett Zoph, due to unethical conduct according to two sources familiar with the matter. CEO Mira Murati announced the news at an all-hands with employees today. Soumith Chintala will be taking over as CTO. (Kylie Robison/@kyliebytes)

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X updates Grok to prevent the "editing of images of real people in revealing clothing such as bikinis" and geoblocks it for all users "where it's illegal" (Karissa Bell/Engadget)

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Coinbase pulls support from the US Senate's crypto market structure bill ahead of a key vote; CEO Brian Armstrong says there are "too many issues" with the bill (Nikhilesh De/CoinDesk)

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YouTube now lets parents set time limits on their kids' YouTube Shorts feed, ranging from 15 minutes to two hours, with an option for zero minutes coming soon (Stevie Bonifield/The Verge)

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Trump signs an order to impose a 25% tariff on chips "transshipped through the United States to other foreign countries", as part of the Nvidia H200 deal (Josh Wingrove/Bloomberg)

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UK PM Keir Starmer says X indicated to government officials it was acting to comply with UK laws by restricting the generation of non-consensual sexual images (Financial Times)

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Novee, which utilizes proprietary AI models to perform automated penetration testing, emerges from stealth with a $43M Series A and an $8.5M seed (Chris Metinko/Axios)

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PJM trims summer 2027 peak demand forecast to ~160 GW from ~164 GW because some projects, including data centers, lack firm service or construction commitments (Naureen S Malik/Bloomberg)

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OpenAI strikes a multibillion-dollar agreement to buy 750 MW of computing capacity from Cerebras over three years; sources: the deal is worth more than $10B (Wall Street Journal)

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Bitchat, a P2P messaging app launched by Jack Dorsey, has emerged as a key lifeline for people in Uganda and Iran facing government-imposed internet shutdowns (Reuters)

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Digg, rebooted under original founder Kevin Rose and Alexis Ohanian, launches its open beta; the site had been open to 67,000 users on an invite-only basis (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

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2026 may be the year of the mega IPO, as sources say Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX took early steps to go public, setting up a watershed moment for the AI boom (New York Times)

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Verizon says it is "aware of an issue impacting wireless voice and data services for some customers", as thousands of users report no cellular reception (Jacob Krol/TechRadar)

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California AG Rob Bonta opens an investigation into xAI over the proliferation of nonconsensual, sexualized images generated by Grok, and urges xAI to act (Politico)

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Elon Musk claims he's "not aware of any naked underage images generated by Grok" and that Grok's operating principle is to "obey the laws of any given country" (Raphael Satter/Reuters)

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Elon Musk claims he's "not aware of any naked underage images generated by Grok" and that Grok's operating principle is to "obey the laws of any given country" (Reuters)

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Depthfirst, which provides AI tools for codebase scanning, credential exposure protection, and threat monitoring, raised a $40M Series A led by Accel Partners (Lucas Ropek/TechCrunch)

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Google launches Personal Intelligence, a Gemini feature that links to Gmail, Google Photos, Search, and YouTube history to tailor answers, for paid subscribers (Sabrina Ortiz/ZDNET)

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Sources: the Trump administration is weighing a substantial shift in its cyberstrategy, including by enlisting private companies to assist with cyberattacks (Adam Sella/New York Times)

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Dutch court hearing: Nexperia claims Chinese owner Wingtech pushed for tech transfers out of Europe and threatened execs; Wingtech attacks Nexperia's management (Bloomberg)

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Belgium-based Aikido Security, which offers automated security guardrails for developers, raised a $60M Series B led by DST Global at a $1B valuation (Supantha Mukherjee/Reuters)

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Source: Microsoft has become one of Anthropic's top clients and was recently on pace to spend nearly $500M/year for Anthropic's AI to power Microsoft products (The Information)

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Tel Aviv- and Boston-based IO River, which helps companies manage multiple CDN and edge networks, raised a $20M Series A led by Venture Guides and New Era (Chris Metinko/Axios)

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UK police say they banned Maccabi Tel Aviv fans from a soccer match in 2025 after Copilot hallucinated a fake West Ham-Maccabi match in an intelligence report (Tom Warren/The Verge)

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