← Back to news

T

Techmeme RSS Feed

Databricks raised $5B in equity financing and $2B in debt at a $134B valuation and says its annualized revenue crossed $5.4B for the January quarter, up 65% YoY (Jordan Novet/CNBC)

EU officials and tech executives inaugurate a €2.5B chips research hub in Belgium; ASML and Imec emphasized that the US is dependent on European chip tech (Pieter Haeck/Politico)

Gather AI, which builds "curious" AI for drones and cameras to autonomously monitor warehouses, raised a $40M Series B, taking its total funding to $74M (Julie Bort/TechCrunch)

Source: Apollo nears a ~$3.4B loan deal to a Valor-led investment vehicle to buy Nvidia chips for leasing to xAI; through fall 2025, xAI was burning $1B+/month (Miles Kruppa/The Information)

Discord says it will roll out age verification globally from March to access some content; all accounts will have a "teen-appropriate experience by default" (Stevie Bonifield/The Verge)

Uber agrees to acquire Getir's delivery operations from Mubadala for $335M in cash and says it will take a 15% stake in the remaining portfolio for $100M (Bloomberg)

How Oura won over DC by growing its lobbying spend to $1M+ per year, as RFK Jr. touts wearables for health and the US DOD makes the rings an employee benefit (Amanda Chu/Politico)

Sources: Alphabet aims to raise ~$15B from a US high-grade dollar bond sale, as it seeks to finance $185B in 2026 capex; Alphabet raised $17.5B in November 2025 (Bloomberg)

Slack message: Sam Altman tells staff that ChatGPT is "back to exceeding 10% monthly growth", and OpenAI plans to release "an updated Chat model" this week (CNBC)

Alibaba's Qwen temporarily stops issuing coupons due to customer overload, hampering Alibaba's Agentic AI ad campaign; Qwen began offering coupons on February 6 (Eduardo Baptista/Reuters)

Sources: AI legal software startup Harvey seeks to raise $200M led by Sequoia and GIC at an $11B valuation, up from $8B after raising $160M in December 2025 (Iain Martin/Forbes)

How the US government is adopting AI: NASA reports 420 AI use cases in 2025, up from 18 in 2024, HHS reports 398, Energy 325, DOJ 295, Interior 234, and DHS 205 (Washington Post)

A profile of Amanda Askell, Anthropic's resident philosopher, who is learning Claude's reasoning patterns in a bid to endow the chatbot with a sense of morality (Wall Street Journal)

ByteDance debuts Seedance 2.0, a new version of its AI video generation model that can produce multi-shot scenes, available to select Jimeng and Jianying users (Juro Osawa/The Information)

Franco-Italian chipmaker STMicro agrees to supply AWS with various chips, including for high-bandwidth connectivity and power management; STM jumps 5%+ (Christina Kyriasoglou/Bloomberg)

Chinese chip designer Montage raised $902M in its Hong Kong IPO, jumping 64% in its market debut, the biggest rise since Kuaishou's $6.2B Hong Kong IPO in 2021 (Julia Zhong/Bloomberg)

YouTube launches a Premium paywall for song lyrics on YouTube Music, after testing it in recent months; users get five free lyrics before they have to subscribe (Abner Li/9to5Google)

The European Commission sends a statement of objections to Meta over WhatsApp blocking rival AI chatbots, warning it will take measures to avoid "serious" harm (Bloomberg)

PE firm Advent, FedEx, A&R, and PPF agree to acquire Polish automated parcel delivery company InPost for €7.8B; the company has 61K automated parcel lockers (Dominic Chopping/Wall Street Journal)

Q&A with YouTube VP of Subscription Products Christian Oestlien on YouTube TV's future, the NFL and Oscars deals, its friendly rivalry with Netflix, and more (Lucas Shaw/Bloomberg)

Crypto.com CEO Kris Marszalek launches ai.com during the Super Bowl and opens up username handle registration to let users get a private, personalized AI agent (Brayden Lindrea/Cointelegraph)

A look at Tether's global expansion, after it recently hit ~300 staff; sources describe Tether's internal focus on corporate structure and "profit and loss" (Jill R Shah/Financial Times)

A look at the 2026 Super Bowl ads from Anthropic, Amazon, OpenAI, and others, as AI continued to take center stage in ad creation and AI product promotion (Lauren Forristal/TechCrunch)

China says its trade surplus from digital services rose 100%+ to a record $33B in 2025, boosted by overseas revenue of AI, livestreaming, and e-commerce (Bloomberg)

How Runna, an AI-powered virtual coaching app acquired by Strava in 2025, toned down its aggressive training plans following reports of injuries from some users (Nicole Nguyen/Wall Street Journal)

Blackstone and Coatue grant a $10B loan to Australian AI infrastructure startup Firmus for data center expansion, among Australia's largest private credit deals (Bloomberg)

How China boosts its humanoid robot industry, giving companies land, favorable bank loan terms, and sometimes subsidizing the robots' purchase price by ~10% (Wall Street Journal)

An interview with Jeannette zu Fürstenberg, who General Catalyst promoted to president in January, on investing in European tech and defense startups, and more (Mark Bergen/Bloomberg)

As Section 230 turns 30, a look at how upcoming court cases involving Meta, Alphabet, and others in the US could reshape the bounds of Section 230's protections (Lauren Feiner/The Verge)

Moltbook was peak AI theater, offering less of a glimpse at the future and more of a mirror simply reflecting society's current obsession with AI (Will Douglas Heaven/MIT Technology Review)

How AI is impacting the romance novel industry, with authors failing to disclose AI use and using pen names more, bogging down the publishing ecosystem (Alexandra Alter/New York Times)

T-glass, a type of ultrathin glass sheet used in advanced chips, is in short supply and largely comes from Nittobo, which is not adding capacity for months (Yang Jie/Wall Street Journal)

A software engineer explains "AI fatigue", compounded by a FOMO treadmill of using AI labs' latest tools and "thinking atrophy", alongside boosted productivity (Siddhant Khare)

OpenClaw partners with VirusTotal and says that all skills published to ClawHub are now scanned using VirusTotal's threat intelligence (The Hacker News)

Sources: Block is notifying hundreds of staff their jobs may be eliminated during annual performance reviews; up to 10% of the workforce is at risk of being cut (Bloomberg)

Q&A with mathematicians behind the "First Proof" experiment, which tests AI's mathematical competence on questions drawn from the authors' unpublished research (Siobhan Roberts/New York Times)

Sources: iPhone 17e with MagSafe is coming soon; iOS 26.4 beta with updated Siri slated for the week of Feb. 23, M5 MacBook Pros as early as the week of Mar. 2 (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

How Anthropic's bet on enterprise users is paying off; sources: Anthropic's guidance to investors claims annualized revenue will exceed $30B by the end of 2026 (George Hammond/Financial Times)

Analysis: World Liberty Financial has earned the Trump family at least $1.2B in cash since its launch, while the Witkoff family has earned at least $200M (Wall Street Journal)

European countries are moving toward social media bans for children, even as doubts persist over implementation and the risk of a new battle with US tech groups (Financial Times)

This year's projected capex ramp-up will all but wipe out free cash flow for Amazon, Google, and Meta, potentially forcing stock buyback cuts or more borrowing (Martin Peers/The Information)

Analysts say a design refresh for the iPhone 17 lineup has reinforced Apple's status-symbol appeal in China, with the "cosmic orange" Pro model going viral (Financial Times)

A profile of Ali Ansari, the 25-year-old co-founder of micro1, which recruits human experts to train AI systems; micro1 was last valued at $500M in Sept. 2025 (Nilesh Christopher/Los Angeles Times)

Anthropic rolls out a fast mode for Claude Opus 4.6 in research preview, saying it offers the same model quality 2.5 times faster but costs six times more (Simon Willison/Simon Willison's Weblog)

India's updated startup framework doubles deep-tech startup eligibility to 20 years and triples the revenue cap for tax, grant, and regulatory benefits to ~$33M (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

Chinese regulators reiterate the mainland crypto ban and expand enforcement to cover real-world asset tokenization and offshore yuan-pegged stablecoin issuance (Naga Avan-Nomayo/The Block)

X unveils a new pay-per-use pricing model for its API, replacing the earlier pricing model that required developers to pay fixed monthly fees of $200 or $5,000 (Rohit Singh/MediaNama)

Sources: Mercor rival micro1 has told investors it is now generating $200M in recurring revenue; Mercor is offering micro1 employees signing bonuses up to $2M (Anna Tong/Forbes)

A look at Corning's booming fiber-optic business, boosted by data center demand and a $6B Meta deal, as Nvidia explores Corning's co-packaged optics for servers (Christopher Mims/Wall Street Journal)

After talking with ~40 people at Anthropic, a look at its "Yes, and..." culture where every idea is welcomed and judged based on vibes, like a hive mind (Steve Yegge)