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Sources: Elon Musk is pushing for a SpaceX IPO by July, seems eager to beat OpenAI and Anthropic to market, and views it as a way to help xAI catch its rivals (Wall Street Journal)

YouTube CEO Neal Mohan says creators will be able to generate Shorts using their AI likenesses later in 2026, and touts AI tools for making games and music (Jay Peters/The Verge)

YouTube CEO Neal Mohan publishes his annual letter, saying YouTube aims to reduce "AI slop" and has strengthened parental controls, and teases Shorts updates (Alex Weprin/The Hollywood Reporter)

European VC funding rose 9% YoY to hit $58B in 2025, vs. North America's 46% YoY jump; AI led with ~$17.5B, followed by biotech's ~$13.4B and hardware's ~$10.8B (Gené Teare/Crunchbase News)

Jensen Huang says that AI is already bringing economic benefits and needs more investment, and "the AI bubble comes about because the investments are large" (Mauro Orru/Wall Street Journal)

OpenEvidence, which is building "ChatGPT for doctors", raised $250M led by Thrive and DST at a $12B valuation, up from $6B in October and $1B in February 2025 (Kate Rooney/CNBC)

Salt Lake City-based Zanskar, which uses AI to find overlooked geothermal fields to boost US electricity supply, raised $115M, taking its total funding to $180M (Benoît Morenne/Wall Street Journal)

Sensor Tower: consumers spent $85B on apps globally in 2025, up 21% YoY, and, in a first, more money went on non-game mobile apps than on games, driven by GenAI (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

The BBC confirms a "strategic partnership" with YouTube to produce exclusive content, including news and YouTube channels aimed at children and young adults (Alex Ritman/Variety)

Ukrainian-founded language learning marketplace Preply raised a $150M Series D led by WestCap at a $1.2B valuation; the startup has a 150-person office in Kyiv (Anna Heim/TechCrunch)

Lightning AI merges with data center operator Voltage Park to create an "AI cloud" with a $2.5B valuation, managing 35,000+ Nvidia GPUs across six data centers (Iain Martin/Forbes)

Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth: Superintelligence Labs delivered its first high-profile AI models internally in January, after just six months, which are "very good" (Jeffrey Dastin/Reuters)

Israeli startup DataRails, which offers financial planning and analytics tools, raised a $70M Series C led by One Peak at an estimated $600M to $700M valuation (Globes)

Chinese AI startup Zhipu says it is limiting GLM Coding Plan access after strong demand, taking only 20% of its current daily new subscriptions from January 23 (Bloomberg)

GlobalWafers Chair Doris Hsu says the Taiwanese silicon wafer maker is preparing for phase two of its Texas plant, after unveiling plans to invest an extra $4B (Wen-Yee Lee/Reuters)

Berlin-based Cloover, which makes software to help install solar, home batteries, and heat pumps, raised $22M from Lowercarbon and others and $1.2B in debt (Coco Liu/Bloomberg)

How Ukraine and Russia both rely on the same Chinese drone suppliers, whose tech is vital to the war; China officially bans sensitive drone tech exports to both (Financial Times)

US colleges like Virginia Tech and Georgia Tech are using AI to streamline admissions; Virginia Tech says AI that scores essay questions saved ~8,000 hours (Francesca Maglione/Bloomberg)

Sources: OpenAI begins offering its chatbot ads to dozens of advertisers, initially charging per ad view, not per ad click, and asks them for <$1M commitments (The Information)

As Taiwanese chipmakers push localization to secure supply chains, suppliers to the steel, plastics, and display industries are moving into Taiwan's chip sector (Cheng Ting-Fang/Nikkei Asia)

A programmer estimates his typical day of coding with Claude Code is equivalent to running the dishwasher an extra time, much more energy than a "median query" (Simon P. Couch)

Galaxy Digital plans to launch a hedge fund in Q1 2026 investing up to 30% in crypto tokens and the rest in financial stocks; sources say it has raised $100M (Nikou Asgari/Financial Times)

Bengaluru-based Amagi, an ad tools provider for broadcast and streaming TV, fell below its listing price in its India market debut after raising $196M in an IPO (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

Thoma Bravo co-founder Orlando Bravo says the slump in software company valuations over threat of AI-driven disruption is creating a "huge buying opportunity" (Financial Times)

Payments using facial recognition are growing in South Korea as the tech improves; South Korean fintech app Toss has scaled its "Facepay" service to 1M+ users (Nami Matsuura/Nikkei Asia)

The Gates Foundation and OpenAI plan to invest $50M to use AI to ease the impact of chronic staff shortages in 1,000 primary health clinics in Africa by 2028 (Financial Times)

Apple wins dismissal of parts of a class action alleging it violated CA privacy law by collecting user data from its apps despite users believing they opted out (Isaiah Poritz/Bloomberg Law)

Signal's Meredith Whittaker says deeper integration of AI agents into devices is "perilous" for encryption, since agents need access to lots of data across apps (Shona Ghosh/Bloomberg)

China's Cyberspace Administration requires firms to file their AI tools in a public algorithm registry, creating a detailed map of the country's AI ecosystem (Yi-Ling Liu/Wired)

OpenAI says it will cover the costs of developing energy-related infrastructure at its Stargate data centers to ensure they don't raise consumers' utility bills (Bloomberg)

Barret Zoph says Thinking Machines Lab fired him only after learning he was leaving, and at no time did the company cite his performance or unethical conduct (Wall Street Journal)

Apple outages affecting multiple services, including Apple TV, the App Store, and iCloud, are now fixed following a nearly four-hour disruption on January 20 (Juli Clover/MacRumors)

Analysis: the Trump family has generated ~$1.4B from crypto projects since President Trump's inauguration in January 2025, making up ~20% of their fortune (Bloomberg)

G42 CEO Peng Xiao says AI chip shipments from Nvidia, AMD, and Cerebras are set to arrive in the UAE within the next few months, as the UAE builds a 200MW hub (Bloomberg)

Sources: Applied Compute, which lets companies customize models with their own data, is in talks to raise funding at a $1.3B valuation, up from $500M in October (The Information)

The EC introduces draft revisions to the EU's Cybersecurity Act to phase out equipment from high-risk suppliers in critical sectors, a move criticized by Huawei (Foo Yun Chee/Reuters)

X says it has open sourced its "core recommendation system" on GitHub and that the system "ranks everything using a Grok-based transformer model" (Lucas Ropek/TechCrunch)

Drone delivery startup Zipline raised $600M+, boosting its valuation to $7.6B, and says it has now completed 2M+ commercial deliveries of 20M different items (Edward Ludlow/Bloomberg)

Greg Peters says Netflix plans to bring new content types like video podcasts to its vertical video feed, and plans to roll out a new mobile UI later in 2026 (Caitlin Huston/The Hollywood Reporter)

Demis Hassabis says there aren't "any plans" to put ads in Gemini and, in response to OpenAI testing ads, says "maybe they feel they need to make more revenue" (Alex Heath/Sources)

A Massachusetts judge grants a preliminary injunction blocking Kalshi from letting state residents bet on sports through its online platform (Nate Raymond/Reuters)

Snap reaches an agreement to settle a social media addiction lawsuit in California, a week before the start of a trial in the first of several such lawsuits (Cecilia Kang/New York Times)

Elon Musk and Sam Altman clashed on X after Musk shared a post about a man who committed a murder-suicide following delusional conversations with ChatGPT (Theo Wayt/The Information)

Netflix's ad revenue hit $1.5B in 2025, up by more than 2.5x vs. 2024, and viewing hours grew 2% YoY in H2, driven by a 9% rise in viewing of branded originals (Dade Hayes/Deadline)

Netflix reports Q4 revenue up 18% YoY to $12B vs. $11.97B est., 325M paid subs, 2025 revenue up 16% to $45.2B, plans to increase content spend by 10% in 2026 (Lucas Shaw/Bloomberg)

The US DOJ says at least two DOGE employees accessed Social Security data that was off-limits under a court ruling and shared agency data on third-party servers (April Rubin/Axios)

The US FTC files a notice to appeal a November 2025 ruling that found Meta did not hold an illegal monopoly by acquiring Instagram and WhatsApp (Jody Godoy/Reuters)

OpenAI rolls out age prediction on ChatGPT globally to identify users under 18 and apply automatic content protections as it prepares to introduce adult content (Juby Babu/Reuters)

Filings from Elon Musk's OpenAI lawsuit detail Microsoft's decade-long OpenAI relationship, like establishing a new subsidiary for Sam Altman while he was fired (Todd Bishop/GeekWire)

xAI co-founder Greg Yang says he is stepping back from the startup into an informal advisory role to focus on his health after being diagnosed with Lyme disease (Carmen Arroyo/Bloomberg)