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Deezer makes its AI music detection tool available for businesses to buy and says daily deliveries of AI tracks averaged 60K in January, ~39% of total uploads (Emma Roth/The Verge)

Talos, which develops digital asset trading infrastructure, raised a $45M extension from Robinhood and others to its $105M Series B, at a $1.5B valuation (Will Canny/CoinDesk)

Russia says a crypto regulatory framework will come into force July 1, 2027; it will ban privacy coins like monero and cap retail investor purchases at ~$4K (Olivier Acuna/CoinDesk)

Google expands Gemini's hands-free conversational capabilities to walking and cycling modes in Google Maps, available on iOS and rolling out on Android (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch)

Nvidia launches a native GeForce NOW app for Linux, starting with Debian-based Ubuntu, after releasing a Steam Deck app in 2025; in a hands-on, it works well (Ben Wilson/Windows Central)

Waymo says a robotaxi struck a child at 6 mph near an elementary school in Santa Monica on January 23, resulting in minor injuries; the NHTSA opens a probe (Sean O'Kane/TechCrunch)

Waymo says it hopes to launch its London robotaxi service as soon as September, after an April pilot; the UK government plans to change regulations in H2 2026 (Zoe Kleinman/BBC)

Dow plans to cut 4,500 staff to save costs and will rely on AI to boost productivity, resulting in $1.1B to $1.5B in charges; it currently employs ~34,000 staff (Rob Curran/Wall Street Journal)

Apple's iPhone 16 was the world's best-selling smartphone in 2025, followed by the 16 Pro Max and 16 Pro; Apple took 7 of the top 10 spots and Samsung took 3 (Counterpoint Research)

Crypto exchange Bybit plans to offer banking services via "MyBank" accounts that can hold USD and other currencies, set to launch in February pending approvals (Ryan Weeks/Bloomberg)

Sources: ByteDance and Alibaba both plan to release flagship AI models around China's mid-February Lunar New Year holiday, including ByteDance's Doubao 2.0 (The Information)

Nothing CEO Carl Pei says the company's flagship Phone 4 won't launch in 2026: "We're not just going to churn out a new flagship every year for the sake of it" (Dominic Preston/The Verge)

Munich-based RobCo, which makes robotic arms and factory automation software, raised $100M led by Lingotto and Lightspeed, a source says at a $500M+ valuation (Mark Bergen/Bloomberg)

Amazon reported hundreds of thousands of pieces of potential CSAM in AI training data to NCMEC in 2025; child safety officials say Amazon didn't give the source (Bloomberg)

Samsung and SK Hynix executives say they expect global memory supply shortages will persist until 2027 due to AI demand, after the companies reported earnings (Kim Jaewon/Nikkei Asia)

Chinese media: China executed 11 members of the Ming mafia family that ran online scam centres in Myanmar; five Bai family members are also sentenced to death (Koh Ewe/BBC)

Alibaba's Cainiao logistics unit merges with Chinese robovan company Zelos, creating a business sources say valued at ~$2B with a fleet set to hit 20K+ vehicles (Jiahui Huang/Wall Street Journal)

The US SEC clarifies its tokenized stock rules, saying they are subject to securities and derivatives rules and issuer approval is required for true ownership (Sam Reynolds/CoinDesk)

Tesla plans to scrap its premium S and X models and convert its California factory into an Optimus manufacturing hub, as Elon Musk refocuses on robotics and AI (Financial Times)

STMicro reports Q4 net revenue up 0.2% YoY to $3.33B, operating income down 66% YoY to $125M, and forecasts Q1 2026 net revenue of $3.04B, above $2.92B est. (Christina Kyriasoglou/Bloomberg)

Amazon's $35M marketing campaign for Melania is ~10x the budget for similar documentaries like CNN's RBG; some suggest Amazon is currying favor with Trump (New York Times)

SAP reports Q4 revenue up 3% YoY to €9.68B, adjusted operating profit up 27% to €2.83B, and forecasts 2026 cloud revenue to grow 23%+ to €25.8B; SAP falls 14%+ (Bloomberg)

Airtable unveils Superagent, a service that can deploy AI agents in parallel for tasks like market analysis, its first standalone product in its 13-year history (Connie Loizos/TechCrunch)

Jones Lang LaSalle projects Malaysia's operational data center capacity to increase from ~1,025 MW at the end of 2025 to ~2,100 MW by the end of 2026 (Norman Goh/Nikkei Asia)

The US construction industry is adopting AI tools to improve project management and support site managers and foremen; IDC says 60% of firms use some form of AI (Belle Lin/Wall Street Journal)

A look at Amazon's and Walmart's differing approaches to agentic AI shopping; Similarweb says Walmart doubled its AI referral share in the US to 32.5% in 2025 (Financial Times)

Security researchers warn Moltbot, previously Clawdbot, requires a specialist skillset to use safely, as data exposure risks persist even when set up correctly (Connor Jones/The Register)

A federal judge in Virginia ruled that Norfolk's use of ~200 Flock automated license plate scanners is constitutional and doesn't violate the Fourth Amendment (Cyrus Farivar/Ars Technica)

Advantest shares hit a record high after the chip equipment maker beat Q3 earnings estimates and raised its FY operating profit forecast from $2.45B to $2.97B (Momoka Yokoyama/Bloomberg)

SK Hynix surpassed Samsung in annual operating profit for the first time in 2025; SK Hynix posted a record profit of ~$33B in 2025 while Samsung posted ~$30.5B (Dylan Butts/CNBC)

New York-based Sword Health, which develops AI-powered tech for managing pain and offers remote physical therapy, agrees to acquire rival Kaia Health for $285M (Henrique Almeida/Bloomberg)

Letter: Rep. John Moolenaar, chair of the US House Select Committee on China, says Nvidia helped DeepSeek hone AI models later used by the Chinese military (Stephen Nellis/Reuters)

DeepSeek job listings show it hopes to broaden its AI offerings with a search engine capable of supporting multiple languages and more emphasis on agents (Saritha Rai/Bloomberg)

US-based AI startup Arcee releases Trinity Large, a 400B-parameter open-weight model that it says compares to Meta's Llama 4 Maverick 400B on some benchmarks (Julie Bort/TechCrunch)

Sources: OpenAI is in talks to raise up to $30B from Nvidia, less than $10B from Microsoft, and $10B-$20B from Amazon as part of a $100B funding round (Sri Muppidi/The Information)

Google agrees to pay $135M to settle a proposed class action lawsuit alleging that the tech giant programmed Android to illegally collect users' cellular data (Jonathan Stempel/Reuters)

The UK's Advertising Standards Authority bans some Coinbase ads, finding them "irresponsible" for suggesting crypto as a solution to the cost of living crisis (Tom Knowles/The Guardian)

LinkedIn's Q2 revenue rose 11% YoY, topping $5B for the first time, giving it a $20B+ annual run rate; Satya Nadella says LinkedIn paid video ads grew 30% YoY (Todd Bishop/GeekWire)

Samsung reports Q4 revenue up 24% YoY to ~$65.6B, vs. ~$65.28B est., and operating profit up 200%+ to ~$14.06B, driven by memory chip price surge and HBM demand (Dylan Butts/CNBC)

Google says it took legal action to take down dozens of domains and disrupt the residential proxy network of Chinese company Ipidea, widely used by bad actors (Robert McMillan/Wall Street Journal)

SK Hynix announces a new US-based "AI Company" from a restructuring of its California-based subsidiary Solidigm, and commits at least $10B to the new entity (Dylan Butts/CNBC)

In Meta's Q4 earnings call, Mark Zuckerberg says it plans to start shipping new models and products throughout 2026 and hints at "agentic shopping tools" (Russell Brandom/TechCrunch)

Satya Nadella says Windows 11 reached 1B users during Q2, growing over 45% YoY and at a faster rate than Windows 10 did (Tom Warren/The Verge)

Sebastiaan de With, co-founder of the iPhone camera app Halide who previously freelanced for Apple, says he has joined Apple's Human Interface Design team (Chance Miller/9to5Mac)

Sources: OpenAI is considering using biometric verification like World's eyeball scanning Orb for its planned social network to ensure its users are real people (Anna Tong/Forbes)

Sources: the White House will meet with banks and crypto firms on Monday to discuss a path forward for crypto legislation stalled by a clash between the sectors (Hannah Lang/Reuters)

ServiceNow reports Q4 revenue up 20.5% YoY to $3.57B, vs. $3.53B est., and subscription revenue up 21% YoY to $3.47B; NOW drops ~3% after hours (Samantha Subin/CNBC)

Tesla says it agreed to invest $2B in xAI for preferred shares as part of xAI's Series E, despite a shareholder vote in November that failed to win approval (Kara Carlson/Bloomberg)

Microsoft reports Azure Q2 revenue up 39% YoY, vs. 38.8% est.; Microsoft cloud's contracted backlog grew 110% to $625B, ~45% of which was driven by OpenAI alone (Reuters)

PaleBlueDot, which operates a GPU capacity marketplace and designs GPU clusters for enterprises, raised a $150M Series B led by B Capital at a $1B+ valuation (Krystal Hu/Reuters)