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Techmeme

Alphabet says it expects 2026 capex to be in the range of $175B to $185B, vs. ~$120B est., up from $91.4B in 2025; Q4 capex was $27.9B, up from $14B a year ago (Stephen Morris/Financial Times)

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Google parent Alphabet forecasts sharp surge in 2026 capital spending (Deborah Sophia/Reuters)

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Alphabet reports YouTube's Q4 ad revenue rose 9% YoY to $11.38B, vs. $11.84B est., and YouTube's annual revenue "surpassed $60B across ads and subscriptions" (Todd Spangler/Variety)

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Alphabet reports Q4 revenue up 18% YoY to $113.83B, vs. $111.43B est., Google Cloud revenue up 48% to $17.66B, vs. $16.18B est., net income up 30% to $34.46B (Alphabet)

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Internal memos: Meta said Avocado is its "most capable pre-trained base model" and achieves 10x compute efficiency "wins" on text tasks vs. Llama 4 Maverick (Jyoti Mann/The Information)

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Sam Altman says Anthropic's Super Bowl ads are funny but "dishonest", and Anthropic serves a "product to rich people" while OpenAI is "committed to free access" (Sam Altman/@sama)

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Lunar Energy, which develops software that syncs batteries across homes into "virtual power plants" and began deploying its own batteries in 2025, raised $232M (Coco Liu/Bloomberg)

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Google teases the Pixel 10a in a new 15-second video, revealing a completely flat dual-camera system on the back, and says preorders begin on February 18 (Abner Li/9to5Google)

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Microsoft integrates Claude and Codex AI coding agents directly into GitHub, GitHub Mobile, and Visual Studio Code, for Copilot Pro Plus and Enterprise users (Tom Warren/The Verge)

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Microsoft says cybersecurity head Charlie Bell will move into a position focused on engineering quality; Hayete Gallot will return from Google to run security (Jordan Novet/CNBC)

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Roblox launches a "4D generation" feature in open beta, letting creators generate interactive objects with individual moving parts rather than static 3D models (Lauren Forristal/TechCrunch)

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EnFi, which makes AI agents that analyze and make decisions on credit applications, raised a $15M Series A led by Fintop, bringing its total funding to $22.5M (Tatiana Bautzer/Reuters)

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AI chipmaker Cerebras raised a ~$1B Series H led by Tiger Global at a $23B valuation, up from $8.1B in September 2025; Benchmark, Fidelity, and AMD invested too (Ian King/Bloomberg)

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Uber promotes Balaji Krishnamurthy, its former VP of strategic finance and investor relations, to be its CFO, replacing Prashanth Mahendra-Rajah (Ram Iyer/TechCrunch)

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Mistral debuts Voxtral Transcribe 2, a family of speech-to-text models with speaker diarization and ultra-low latency, under the Apache 2.0 open-weight license (Sabrina Ortiz/The Deep View)

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Adobe ramped up its ads in 2025, spending $1.4B amid AI competition and Wall Street skepticism, a significantly higher share of sales than other tech companies (Brody Ford/Bloomberg)

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Sources: Amazon and OpenAI are discussing a deal that could require OpenAI to dedicate its researchers and engineers to developing customized models for Amazon (The Information)

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AI voice startup ElevenLabs raised a $500M Series D led by Sequoia at an $11B valuation, taking its total funding to nearly $800M, and reports $330M in 2025 ARR (Kate Clark/Wall Street Journal)

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Amazon rolls out Alexa+ to all Prime members in the US via any Alexa-enabled device, Alexa.com, and the Alexa app, and launches a free tier for non-Prime users (Jennifer Pattison Tuohy/The Verge)

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Bedrock, which aims to automate heavy construction equipment like excavators, raised $270M led by CapitalG and the Valor Atreides AI Fund at a $1.75B valuation (Michael J. de la Merced/New York Times)

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Anthropic says "Claude will remain ad-free", its users "won't see 'sponsored' links adjacent to" conversations, and responses won't be influenced by advertisers (Anthropic)

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Resolve AI, which offers AI agents to monitor source code, databases, and infrastructure to address outages, raised $125M led by Lightspeed at a $1B valuation (Rebecca Torrence/Bloomberg)

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Egypt plans to ban Roblox in a bid to curb kids' exposure to potentially harmful online material; the Middle East's most populous nation joins Qatar and Turkey (Bloomberg)

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TRM Labs, which helps law enforcement and companies track crypto and blockchains, raised a $70M Series C led by Blockchain Capital at a $1B valuation (Leo Schwartz/Fortune)

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US Senators introduce the SCAM Act, a bipartisan bill requiring social media platforms to verify advertiser identities via government-issued ID or legal docs (Jeff Horwitz/Reuters)

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An interview with Epic Games Store VP Steven Allison, who says "we have a lot of things" to fix and "the launcher sucks", on 2026 updates like social features (Chris Tapsell/Eurogamer.net)

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Uber says it plans to expand its robotaxi services to Hong Kong, Madrid, Houston, and Zurich in 2026; Hong Kong will be Uber's first autonomous market in Asia (Natalie Lung/Bloomberg)

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Anthropic plans a 30-second ad during the Super Bowl that parodies the prospect of intrusive ads in AI conversations, and will also air a 60-second pregame ad (Suzanne Vranica/Wall Street Journal)

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Texas Instruments plans to buy US chip company Silicon Labs in a $7.5B deal, paying $231/share in cash, closing in H1 2027; Silicon Labs has a $4.5B market cap (Nick Turner/Bloomberg)

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Uber reports Q4 revenue up 20% YoY to $14.37B, Gross Bookings up 22% YoY to $54.1B, trips up 22% YoY to 3.8B, and a $296M net income, below est.; UBER falls 5%+ (Connor Hart/Wall Street Journal)

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Tencent Cloud, DigitalOcean, and Alibaba Cloud add OpenClaw support, giving users access to the AI agent service; many OpenClaw users run it on a Mac mini (Simon Sharwood/The Register)

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Sources: Reno-based chip startup Positron raised a $230M Series B from the QIA and others to build high-speed memory chips, taking its total raised to $300M+ (Rebecca Bellan/TechCrunch)

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Prosus agrees to a multiyear AWS cloud and AI deal that runs into "hundreds of millions of dollars", as it seeks to expand in Europe, India, and Latin America (Loni Prinsloo/Bloomberg)

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Q&A with Stardew Valley developer Eric Barone, aka ConcernedApe, on the game turning 10, evolving as a developer, working solo, cozy game growth, and more (Rebekah Valentine/IGN)

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German chipmaker Infineon reports Q1 revenue up 7% YoY €3.66B, above €3.62B est., expects to raise investments to €2.7B in 2026, and forecasts growing AI demand (Christina Kyriasoglou/Bloomberg)

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Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino says initial plans to raise $15B to $20B were a "misconception"; sources say Tether's advisers have floated raising as little as $5B (Jill R Shah/Financial Times)

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Pinterest fires two employees who it says "wrote custom scripts" that accessed confidential info to track which workers lost their jobs during recent layoffs (BBC)

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A US judge sentences Rui-Siang Lin, who pled guilty to operating the $105M+ dark web narcotics marketplace Incognito Market, to 30 years in US federal prison (Sam Reynolds/CoinDesk)

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Galaxy Digital reports a Q4 net loss of $482M, above $282M est., driven primarily by the crypto market crash, and says its trading volumes declined ~40% QoQ (David Pan/Bloomberg)

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A profile of Obsidian, a game studio Microsoft acquired in 2018, as it seeks to expedite game development and reduce costs after releasing three titles in 2025 (Jason Schreier/Bloomberg)

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An interview with Kai-Fu Lee on his startup 01.ai, which builds agentic AI tools for companies, why he thinks China will beat the US in consumer AI, and more (Eleanor Olcott/Financial Times)

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Sources: banks are marketing at least $56B in investment-grade data center construction loans tied to Oracle's leases, as they seek out new buyers for the loans (Michelle Chan/Financial Times)

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AMD reports $390M in revenue from MI308 AI chip sales in China in Q4; CEO Lisa Su says orders were "from very early in 2025" but shipped in Q4 after US approval (Nikkei Asia)

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Global fintech VC funding rose 27% YoY in 2025 to $51.8B; Y Combinator was the most active investor in the space, participating in 151 deals, up 24.8% YoY (Mary Ann Azevedo/Crunchbase News)

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Sources: Tokyo-based chipmaker Renesas agrees to sell its clocks and timing device business to Nasdaq-listed chip design company SiTime for ~$3B (Nikkei Asia)

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Sources: the US Commerce Department finished reviewing Nvidia's H200 China license, but the State Department seeks tighter restrictions, delaying its approval (Financial Times)

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Recon: the US market share of Copilot as paid users' first choice fell from 18.8% in July 2025 to 11.5% in January 2026, while Gemini's rose from 12.8% to 15.7% (Sebastian Herrera/Wall Street Journal)

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Adobe reverses its plans to discontinue Animate after creators expressed frustration, saying it won't get new features but will remain available "indefinitely" (Jay Peters/The Verge)

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Filing: OpenAI accuses xAI of systematically destroying evidence in its antitrust case by directing employees to use auto-deleting "ephemeral messaging tools" (Madlin Mekelburg/Bloomberg)

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Alaffia Health, which provides AI tools for health plan claims operations, raised a $55M Series B led by Transformation Capital (Duncan Riley/SiliconANGLE)

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