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The US EPA rules that xAI acted illegally by using dozens of methane gas turbines to power its Colossus 1 and Colossus 2 data centers in the Memphis area (Dara Kerr/The Guardian)

Sources: leaders at Thinking Machines Lab confronted Barret Zoph over an alleged relationship with another employee, who is no longer at the lab, in summer 2025 (Maxwell Zeff/Wired)

Anthropic makes Claude Cowork available to $20/month Pro subscribers, after launching it for Max users, and says Pro users may hit their usage limits sooner (Ian Carlos Campbell/Engadget)

California's AG sends a cease-and-desist letter to xAI, demanding the company halt the generation and distribution of non-consensual intimate images and CSAM (Julianna Bragg/Axios)

Google says it's appealing the US v. Google ruling that found it has an illegal search monopoly and asks a court to pause some of the remedies during the appeal (Lauren Feiner/The Verge)

Sources: Anchorage Digital, the first federally chartered US digital asset bank, is seeking to raise $200M to $400M, ahead of a possible IPO in 2027 (Olga Kharif/Bloomberg)

Sources: Google is in talks with broadband operator Radiate to set up a JV to hold their fiber assets; Stonepeak Partners will invest $1B to support the deal (Bloomberg)

Claude Code represents a "ChatGPT moment repeated" and an "extinction-level event" for horizontal software companies focused on human-oriented consumption (Doug OLaughlin/Fabricated Knowledge)

Sources: ElevenLabs seeks to raise hundreds of millions at a valuation of $11B, four months after a secondary share sale that valued it at $6.6B (Financial Times)

Some top California Democrats join Governor Gavin Newsom in opposing a ballot initiative led by a healthcare union seeking a one-time 5% tax on $1B+ in assets (Bloomberg)

FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson says the agency is examining Big Tech's acqui-hires to make sure "they are not an attempt to get around" its merger review process (Bloomberg)

TikTok has launched a standalone micro drama app, PineDrama, in the US and Brazil, offering vertical serialized shows for free without ads or paywalls for now (Business Insider)

OpenAI expands its ChatGPT Go tier to the US and the rest of the world, after launching it in India and some other countries; it will cost $8/month in the US (Elissa Welle/The Verge)

OpenAI will match ads to conversation topics using some personalization data, but says it will not sell user data or expose user conversations to advertisers (Maxwell Zeff/Wired)

OpenAI plans to test ads below ChatGPT replies for users of free and Go tiers in the US; source: OpenAI expects to make "low billions" from ads in 2026 (Financial Times)

Vietnam's military-run telecom company Viettel begins construction of the country's first chip plant, with trial production expected to start by late 2027 (Phuong Nguyen/Reuters)

Istanbul-based TaleMonster Games, the studio behind the puzzle game Match Valley, raised a $30M Series A led by Arcadia Gaming Partners and a16z (Tamara Djurickovic/Tech.eu)

Analysis: Colossus 2, one of the world's largest AI datacenters, uses roughly the same water resources required to supply 2.5 typical In-N-Out Burger locations (SemiAnalysis)

Unsealed docs from Elon Musk's OpenAI lawsuit, set for a jury trial on April 27: Sutskever's concerns about treating open-source AI as a "side show", and more (Alex Heath/Sources)

Unsealed docs from Elon Musk's OpenAI lawsuit, set for a jury trial on April 27: Sutskever's concerns about treating open-source AI as a "side show", and more (Alex Heath/The Verge)

DoorDash Chief Revenue Officer Lee Brown is departing the delivery app company after less than six months; long-term VP Shanna Prevé will succeed Brown as CRO (Natalie Lung/Bloomberg)

ClickHouse, a Snowflake challenger that offers an OLAP database management system, raised $400M led by Dragoneer at a $15B valuation, up from $6.35B in May 2025 (Dina Bass/Bloomberg)

Source: Italian police searched the offices of the country's data protection agency, one of the EU's most proactive regulators, as part of a corruption probe (Reuters)

Q&A with Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos about the $83B WBD bid, Trump's involvement in the deal, maintaining a 45-day theatrical window for WBD releases, and more (Nicole Sperling/New York Times)

Cloudflare acquires AI data marketplace Human Native for an undisclosed sum, to help it develop a system where AI developers pay creators for training content (Davis Giangiulio/CNBC)

Italy's competition watchdog opens two investigations into Microsoft's Activision Blizzard over sales practices the regulator calls "misleading and aggressive" (Reuters)

TikTok says it will roll out new age detection tech, which analyzes profile information to predict whether a user is under 13, across Europe in the coming weeks (Supantha Mukherjee/Reuters)

A profile of Wikipedia as it faces myriad challenges, including attacks from Elon Musk and the far right, reduced traffic due to AI, and a legal battle in India (Darren Loucaides/Financial Times)

Sources: Chinese AI companies seek to rent compute in Southeast Asia and the Middle East for Nvidia Rubin access, as Zhipu and Alibaba warn of a widening US gap (Wall Street Journal)

Australia's eSafety Commissioner reports social media platforms "removed access" to ~4.7M accounts under its ban for under-16s, which took effect in December (New York Times)

SiFive says it will integrate Nvidia's NVLink Fusion with its RISC-V processor IP platforms, letting SiFive silicon communicate with Nvidia's and partner chips (Marco Chiappetta/Forbes)

California regulators unanimously approved Verizon's nearly $10B Frontier acquisition; deliberations included Verizon committing to the state's DEI requirements (Matthew Keys/TheDesk.net)

Meta says it will discontinue Workrooms, its VR space for workers, on February 16, and stop selling Quests and Horizon services to businesses from February 20 (Sean Hollister/The Verge)

Sources: Trump and several state governors agree to direct grid operator PJM to hold an auction for tech companies to fund new power plants due to AI demand (Bloomberg)

YouTube revises its policy to allow full monetization of nongraphic videos on sensitive issues, like abortion, self-harm, suicide, and domestic and sexual abuse (Sam Gutelle/Tubefilter)

Sources: Thinking Machines lacks a clear product or business strategy and has been struggling over the last couple of months to raise a new round of financing (Alex Heath/Sources)

Total global VC funding to fintech startups totaled $51.8B in 2025, up 27% YoY and above pre-pandemic totals, but much lower than 2021's peak of $141.6B (Mary Ann Azevedo/Crunchbase News)

Ashley St. Clair, mother of one of Elon Musk's children, sues xAI, alleging Grok refused to stop making sexualized deepfakes of her, amid custody disputes (Peter Senzamici/New York Post)

As Meta shifts resources away from its Supernatural VR fitness service, users mourn the loss of a community built around the platform and its coaches (Boone Ashworth/Wired)

Google agrees to pay $8.25M to settle a class-action lawsuit alleging its AdMob SDK illegally collected data from children under age 13 (Suzanne Smalley/The Record)

Source: at least two more Thinking Machines staffers are expected to join OpenAI soon; some researchers say they are exhausted by the industry's constant drama (Wired)

Replit launches Mobile Apps on Replit, which enables vibe-coding of iOS apps with integrated Stripe monetization (CNBC)

Sources: Replit is in advanced discussions to raise about $400M in a new round of funding that would roughly triple its valuation to $9B (Bloomberg)

Mytra, which is building autonomous robots for warehouses that can move loads up to 3,000 pounds, raised a $120M Series C led by Avenir Growth (Allie Garfinkle/Fortune)

Andrea Vallone, who left OpenAI in November as the head of its safety research team, joins Anthropic's alignment team (Hayden Field/The Verge)

The US says Taiwanese companies will invest $250B+ in chip production in the US as part of a trade deal, with Taiwanese government guaranteeing $250B in credit (Kif Leswing/CNBC)

Symbolic.ai, founded by ex-eBay CEO Devin Wenig and Ars Technica co-founder Jon Stokes, partners with News Corp to offer AI tools to WSJ, Barron's, and others (Ben Sherry/Inc)

Equal1, which was spun out from University College Dublin, raised $60M to deploy its new quantum server for data centers, bringing its total funding to $85M (Ciara O'Brien/The Irish Times)

Letter: a top House Republican warns severe DRAM and HBM3E supply shortages will constrain H200 export licenses; Nvidia says it "can serve all approved" orders (Maggie Eastland/Bloomberg)

Google releases TranslateGemma, a suite of Gemma 3-based open translation models available in 4B-, 12B-, and 27B-parameter sizes, with support for 55 languages (The Keyword)