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Survey: over 40% of executives said AI saved them more than eight hours per week, while two-thirds of non-management staff said they saved less than two hours (Lindsay Ellis/Wall Street Journal)

Sources: the US Senate's crypto market structure bill is likely to be delayed by several weeks as key lawmakers shift focus to potential housing legislation (Bloomberg)

A year after the DeepSeek shock following R1's release, US tech companies still lead in AI chips, model quality, and sales, with no change in investment trends (Chris Miller/Barron's Online)

German exchange operator Deutsche Boerse agrees to acquire European fund distribution platform Allfunds for about $6.2B in cash and stock (Bloomberg)

Japanese NAND flash maker Kioxia's stock is up ~800% over the past 12 months, as AI demand and constrained NAND flash supply boost the chipmaker's pricing power (Financial Times)

The US House Committee on Foreign Affairs approves a bipartisan bill that calls for arms-sale style congressional oversight of advanced AI chip exports (Bloomberg)

Sources: Anthropic projected a 40% gross margin from selling AI to companies and devs in 2025, down from earlier estimates of 50% due to higher inference costs (Sri Muppidi/The Information)

Deepinder Goyal, CEO of Indian online food delivery service Zomato and its parent Eternal, steps down and will be succeeded by Blinkit CEO Albinder Dhindsa (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

BitGo raises $212.8M in its US IPO, selling ~11.7M shares at $18 each, above the $15 to $17 range, giving it a ~$2.1B market value, in 2026's first crypto IPO (Bloomberg)

xAI engineer Sulaiman Ghori says he has "left" the company after appearing on a podcast last week where he claimed that xAI had been skirting regulations (AJ Dellinger/Gizmodo)

Marketing tech startup Applecart raised $100M in a minority funding round led by Blackstone's growth equity business, a source says at a ~$700M valuation (Myles Miller/Bloomberg)

X unveils Bluesky-like "Starterpacks" to help users find accounts that match their interests, curated by X and rolling out in the coming weeks (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

Vimeo is laying off staff for the second time since September 2025, when it cut 10% of its workforce; Bending Spoons acquired Vimeo for about $1.38B in November (Business Insider)

Sources: Sam Altman has been meeting with top investors in the Middle East, looking to raise at least $50B for OpenAI at a valuation of about $750B to $830B (Bloomberg)

Memo: Barret Zoph, the Thinking Machines Lab cofounder who rejoined OpenAI last week, will lead OpenAI's enterprise push, as part of a broader reorganization (The Information)

Unsealed docs: Spotify and labels sued Anna's Archive over plans to release scraped Spotify data; a US court grants a temporary order taking down some domains (Ernesto Van der Sar/TorrentFreak)

Blue Origin unveils TeraWave, a satellite communications network for enterprise, data center, and government customers, and plans to begin deployment in Q4 2027 (Annie Palmer/CNBC)

Neynar, a startup focused on decentralized social media infrastructure, is acquiring Ethereum-based social media project Farcaster from R&D firm Merkle (Daniel Kuhn/The Block)

Sources: AI chip startup SambaNova is seeking to raise $300M to $500M after talks to sell the company to Intel for about $1.6B, including debt, stalled (Bloomberg)

Sources: Apple is developing an AirTag-sized AI wearable pin with cameras, a speaker, microphones, and wireless charging that could be released as early as 2027 (The Information)

Sources: Apple plans to revamp Siri this fall in iOS 27 and macOS 27 by turning it into the company's first AI chatbot, replacing the current Siri interface (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

A Canadian federal court overturned a 2024 order that would have shuttered TikTok Canada's business operations over national security concerns (Mickey Djuric/Politico)

Sources: Anthropic's revenue run rate hit $9B+ at the end of 2025, up from $4B in July 2025; Iconiq, Lightspeed, and Menlo are set to join its new funding round (Bloomberg)

ElevenLabs launches an album of original tracks made by artists like Liza Minnelli and Art Garfunkel in "collaboration" with its Eleven Music AI model (Todd Spangler/Variety)

Ubisoft cancels six games and delays others amid a restructuring into five genre-specific "creative houses"; it expects net bookings of ~€1.5B for FY 2025-2026 (Benoit Berthelot/Bloomberg)

Anthropic overhauls Claude's "constitution" to enable the AI model to generalize and apply broad principles rather than mechanically follow specific rules (Beatrice Nolan/Fortune)

Meta plans to expand ads on Threads to all users globally starting next week; Threads began testing ads in the US and Japan a year ago (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

Sony launches the $230 LinkBuds Clip, open-style earbuds that sit outside the ear canal, with IPX4 water resistance and a 9-hour battery life, available now (Chris Welch/Bloomberg)

AheadComputing, which develops a breakthrough RISC-V CPU architecture for AI, raised a $30M Seed2 led by Eclipse, Toyota, and Cambium, for $53M in total funding (Kyt Dotson/SiliconANGLE)

Adobe updates Acrobat to add new AI features, including presentation generation, file editing, and creating podcast summaries from docs stored in Adobe Spaces (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

Upscale AI, which is building AI networking infrastructure to take on Cisco, raised $200M led by Tiger, Premji Invest, and Xora Innovation at a $1B+ valuation (Dina Bass/Bloomberg)

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)