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On Joe Rogan's JRE, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck discuss Hollywood and AI; Damon says Netflix wants movies to restate the plot because viewers are on their phones (Jack Dunn/Variety)

Sources: after five Thinking Machines staff left, investors are rattled, potentially impacting fundraising; two researchers quit via Slack during an all-hands (The Information)

Chinese smartphone shipments fell 1.6% YoY in Q4 2025 and 0.6% in 2025 due to weak demand after memory shortages increased prices; iPhone shipments rose 28% YoY (Counterpoint Research)

Sources: US political appointees at CISA blocked Acting Director Madhu Gottumukkala's attempt to remove the agency's chief information officer, Robert Costello (John Sakellariadis/Politico)

Chinese media: phone makers Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo, and Transsion trimmed their 2026 shipment targets, with Oppo cutting up to 20%, due to the memory chip shortage (Maggie Eastland/Bloomberg)

The memory shortage that is spiking RAM prices is now expanding to the broader PC market, driving price hikes for GPUs, high-capacity SSDs, and hard drives (Andrew Cunningham/Ars Technica)

Shenzhen-based UBTech signs deals to supply its Walker S2 humanoid robots to Airbus and Texas Instruments, and says it aims to produce 10,000+ units in 2026 (Bloomberg)

Meta's VR layoffs may help the industry long term, as most affected roles focused on first-party content and games that competed with the broader ecosystem (Palmer Luckey/@palmerluckey)

A look at the business and geopolitical considerations behind TSMC's international expansion, as Taiwan commits to spend $250B+ in the US in a trade deal (Wall Street Journal)

OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar says the company's compute grew from 0.2 GW in 2023 to ~1.9 GW in 2025 and annualized revenue grew from $2B in 2023 to $20B+ in 2025 (Sarah Friar/OpenAI)

Similarweb: Claude's web audience more than doubled in December 2025 compared with December 2024, as many coders spent their holiday breaks on a "Claude bender" (Bradley Olson/Wall Street Journal)

Inside the 2026 National Retail Federation conference in New York City, where integrating AI into retail businesses was the overarching theme on the expo floor (New York Times)

CoinGecko: 53%+ of the 20.2M crypto tokens launched since 2021 are now inactive, with 7.7M tokens failing in Q4 2025, after October 10's "liquidation cascade" (Helene Braun/CoinDesk)

Similarweb: Threads had 141.5M DAUs on iOS and Android as of January 7, driven by Instagram promotions, while X had 125M DAUs; X continues to lead on the web (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

RunPod, an AI app hosting service launched in 2022 that raised a $20M seed in May 2024, says it has reached a $120M annual revenue run rate (Julie Bort/TechCrunch)

Sources: Sequoia is planning a big investment in Anthropic, joining a round led by GIC and Coatue, which are investing $1.5B each; Anthropic aims to raise $25B+ (George Hammond/Financial Times)

Q&A with SiFive co-founder Krste Asanović, who was part of the original team that developed RISC-V, on creating a company that builds IP around RISC-V, and more (Dr. Ian Cutress/More Than Moore)

India's largest retailer Reliance Retail says its daily quick commerce orders peaked at 1.6M in Q4 2025; market leader Blinkit averaged 2.4M daily orders in Q3 (Manish Singh/India Dispatch)

A look at the making of The Thinking Game, a documentary about Google DeepMind and its CEO Demis Hassabis, garnering 285M+ views on YouTube since November 2025 (Ben Cohen/Wall Street Journal)

OpenAI's former Head of Policy Research Miles Brundage announces AVERI, a nonprofit aimed at advocating the idea of external audits for frontier AI models (Jeremy Kahn/Fortune)

Atlantic Council: China-led cross-border digital currency platform mBridge, still a prototype, has processed 4,000+ cross-border transactions totaling $55.5B (Marc Jones/Reuters)

Listen Labs, whose AI tools help Microsoft and others run customer research and interviews, raised a $69M Series B led by Ribbit Capital at a $500M+ valuation (Iain Martin/Forbes)

Mannheim, Germany-based osapiens, a provider of ESG compliance software, raised a $100M Series C from Decarbonization Partners at a $1.1B valuation (John Reynolds/Tech.eu)

David Sacks and top MAGA influencers are publicly opposing House Foreign Affairs Chair Brian Mast's proposed AI OVERWATCH Act to regulate AI chip sales to China (Axios)

The AI boom is driving an unprecedented wave of data center construction, but there aren't enough skilled workers in the US, such as electricians, to keep up (Caroline Haskins/Wired)

A look at Michael Saylor's Strategy, known for buying bitcoin via creative financing strategies, as its stock trades way below its peak amid the crypto downturn (Rob Copeland/New York Times)

Luminate 2025 report: the global music industry hit 5.1T streams, up 9.6% YoY and a single-year record; AI artist Xania Monet had 125M on-demand audio streams (Maria Sherman/Associated Press)

ZachXBT: a crypto user lost $282M+ in BTC and LTC in a hardware wallet social engineering scam; XMR jumped as the attacker began converting the funds to Monero (Daniel Kuhn/The Block)

Micron signs a letter of intent to buy a fabrication site in Taiwan from Powerchip for $1.8B to expand DRAM memory chip production, expected to close in Q2 2026 (Valentine Baldassari/Bloomberg)

Beaconcha.in: a record ~36M ethereum tokens, or 30% of ethereum's total supply, worth ~$119B, are now staked, as institutional investors grow their share (Sage D. Young/Sherwood News)

Sources: following investor backlash, Monzo to give outgoing CEO TS Anil an expanded role after he steps down in February; he is likely to retain a board seat (Laith Al-Khalaf/Financial Times)

TrendForce: data centers will use 70%+ of the high-end memory chips all manufacturers will produce in 2026, with little new manufacturing capacity until 2027 (Christopher Mims/Wall Street Journal)

Filing: Elon Musk seeks $79B-$134B damages from OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging OpenAI defrauded him by abandoning nonprofit roots and partnering with Microsoft (Robert Burnson/Bloomberg)

Appfigures: Sora 2 had ~6M iOS downloads as of December 2025; the Android version, available since early November 2025, had ~3.1M, as growth begins to slow (Sherwood News)

Adobe's stock has slumped more than 45% since the end of 2023, reflecting analyst concerns over the threat of AI-driven disruption to SaaS companies (Ryan Vlastelica/Bloomberg)

Sources: the EU's cybersecurity proposal, to be presented on Jan. 20, is expected to phase out vendors such as Huawei from the bloc's critical infrastructure (Barbara Moens/Financial Times)

Luxembourg-based Hydrosat, which builds AI-based thermal infrared satellite tech to provide data for water resource management and more, raised a $60M Series B (Ingrid Lunden/Resilience Media)

Anthropic appoints Irina Ghose, a former Microsoft India managing director, to lead its business in India, which has the second-largest user base for Claude (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

Micron breaks ground in New York for its memory manufacturing complex, announced in 2022, that it says will be the largest semiconductor facility in the US (Glenn Coin/Syracuse Post-Standard)

Grid operator PJM plans to require large data centers to either bring their own power generation or curtail electricity use to prevent a large-scale outage (Reuters)

Sources: suppliers of parts for Nvidia's H200 chips have paused production after Chinese customs officials blocked shipments of the AI processors (Financial Times)

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)