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Cadence rolls out ChipStack, an AI agent to help chipmakers like Nvidia speed up the complex chip design process by up to 10x by building a "mental model" (Stephen Nellis/Reuters)

How a16z became the dominant influence on Trump-era AI policy, including via Marc Andreessen building key relationships; an ex-official says it has "veto power" (Bloomberg)

YouTube rolls out an AI-powered playlist-generation tool that lets Premium and Music Premium subscribers on iOS and Android use text prompts to create playlists (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

Polymarket partners with Singapore-based Kaito AI to launch "attention markets", letting users bet on "mindshare" and "sentiment" metrics from social media (Alicia Park/Forbes)

Sources: Mark Zuckerberg plans to buy a Miami mansion, likely to cost up to $200M, joining other tech billionaires as California proposes a 5% billionaire tax (Wall Street Journal)

Health care navigation startup Solace, which matches patients with 2K+ advocates, raised $130M led by IVP at a $1B valuation, taking its total funding to $211M (Rebecca Torrence/Bloomberg)

Bretton AI, formerly Greenlite, which uses GenAI to investigate suspicious transactions and verify internal risk policy compliance, raised a $75M Series B (Leo Schwartz/Fortune)

Meta, TikTok, and Snap agree to undergo independent assessments to rate how effectively they protect teen users based on 24 standards developed by experts (Ian Duncan/Washington Post)

Russian media: Russia's communications regulator Roskomnadzor plans to limit access to Telegram from Tuesday, as the government promotes its Max "super app" (Deana Kjuka/Bloomberg)

xAI co-founder Tony Wu says he "resigned", following co-founder Igor Babuschkin's exit in August 2025; Wu was in charge of reasoning and reported to Elon Musk (Juro Osawa/The Information)

Tencent-owned Finnish video game maker Supercell reports 2025 revenue down 4% YoY to €2.65B, EBITDA up 6% YoY to €932M, and 290M monthly active players (Sophie McEvoy/GamesIndustry.biz)

South Korean online travel platform Myrealtrip aims to hit a $1B+ valuation in a Seoul IPO as early as H2 2027, per CEO Donggun Lee, amid a boom in tourism (Jihye Lee/Wall Street Journal)

Satellite executives, investors, and researchers say Elon Musk's aim to launch space data centers by around 2029 is highly ambitious, but the idea is plausible (Tim Bradshaw/Financial Times)

The UK CMA says Apple and Google committed to making app store changes to ensure fairness to developers and consumers, and asks market players for their views (Upmanyu Trivedi/Bloomberg)

Munich-based Constellr, which builds thermal satellite imaging hardware and software, raised a €37M Series A, taking its total funding to €75M (Ingrid Lunden/Resilience Media)

Sources: a VC firm backed by Fidelity billionaire Johnson's family shelves plans to sell its stake in ~40 Chinese tech companies as geopolitical factors ease (Bloomberg)

Spotify reports Q4 revenue up 13% YoY to €4.5B, Premium users up 10% YoY to 290M, MAUs up 11% YoY to 751M, and a €701M operating income, above €639.1M est. (Ashley Carman/Bloomberg)

Analysis: despite AI ads outnumbering traditional Super Bowl ad categories like beer, nostalgia-driven ads from Budweiser and Dunkin' dominated social media (Patrick Coffee/Wall Street Journal)

Alibaba's DAMO Academy releases RynnBrain, an open-source foundation model to help robots perform real-world tasks like navigating rooms, trained on Qwen3-VL (Saritha Rai/Bloomberg)

SMIC reports Q4 revenue up 13% YoY to $2.49B, above est., net profit up 61% YoY to $172.85M, above $139.5M est., and 2025 revenue of $9.33B, above 2024's $8.03B (Sherry Qin/Wall Street Journal)

Source: Chinese AI startup Zhipu anonymously released its new AI model on OpenRouter under the name Pony Alpha; Zhipu plans to launch GLM-5 later this week (Juro Osawa/The Information)

Chinese robotaxi operator Pony AI and Toyota begin commercial production of an autonomous Toyota bZ4X; Pony AI aims to have 3,000+ robotaxis by the end of 2026 (Chester Dawson/Bloomberg)

Chinese AI companies like Alibaba and Tencent are releasing new models and spending millions on "red envelope" freebies to woo users ahead of the Lunar New Year (Cissy Zhou/Nikkei Asia)

PitchBook: European VC investments rose 5% YoY to a post-pandemic high of €66B in 2025; AI-related deals accounted for 35%+, or €23.5B, up from €17.7B in 2024 (Financial Times)

French President Emmanuel Macron says the US could retaliate against EU countries, including France and Spain, over plans to ban children from social media (Leila Abboud/Financial Times)

Paris-based online corporate event booking marketplace Naboo raised a $70M Series B led by Lightspeed with participation from Notion Capital, ISAI, and Ternel (Tamara Djurickovic/Tech.eu)

A court filing in the iyO-OpenAI trademark case reveals OpenAI won't use the name "io" for its AI device, which isn't expected to ship before February 2027 (Maxwell Zeff/Wired)

As OpenAI prepares to retire GPT-4o on February 13, sources say it was scrapped partly because OpenAI struggled to contain 4o's potential for harmful outcomes (Sam Schechner/Wall Street Journal)

London-based Tem, which uses AI to optimize energy transactions for businesses, raised a $75M Series B led by Lightspeed, a source says at a $300M+ valuation (Tim De Chant/TechCrunch)

OpenAI Responds to Critical Super Bowl Commercials by Putting Ads in ChatGPT (Ece Yildirim/Gizmodo)

In opening statements in New Mexico's suit against Meta, state prosecutors argue Meta misrepresented the safety of its platforms, as Meta's attorney pushes back (Morgan Lee/Associated Press)

Farcaster co-founders Dan Romero and Varun Srinivasan, along with the team at Merkle, join stablecoin startup Tempo after Merkle's sale of Farcaster to Neynar (Kyle Baird/The Block)

Sources: the White House is drafting a voluntary pact seeking commitments from tech companies to ensure data centers don't raise electricity prices and more (Politico)

Sources: the Trump administration plans to spare US hyperscalers from upcoming tariffs on chips; exemptions would be based on TSMC's US investment commitments (Aime Williams/Financial Times)

The US NLRB abandons its 2024 case accusing SpaceX of illegally firing eight engineers and signals it will steer clear of future cases against the company (Josh Eidelson/Bloomberg)

Chipmaker Onsemi reports Q4 revenue down 11% YoY to $1.53B, vs. $1.54B est., as its two biggest business units continue to post sales declines; ON drops 4%+ (Katherine Hamilton/Wall Street Journal)

Sources: crypto exchange Backpack, built by ex-FTX and Alameda leaders, is in talks to raise $50M at a $1B pre-money valuation, reports $100M+ in annual revenue (Ryan Lawler/Axios)

Oxide Computer, which lets companies build their own cloud, raised $200M led by USIT, taking its total funding to nearly $390M since its 2019 founding (Chris Metinko/Axios)

Sources: Stripe is in talks to launch a tender offer that could value the company at $140B+, up from $107B last fall, when it bought back shares from investors (Lucinda Shen/Axios)

An eight-month study at a US tech company finds AI tools didn't reduce work but intensified it, as employees worked faster and took on a broader range of tasks (Harvard Business Review)

OpenAI says ads in ChatGPT are not eligible to appear near "sensitive or regulated topics like health, mental health or politics" (Madison Mills/Axios)

OpenAI says it has started testing ads in ChatGPT in the US for logged-in adult users on the Free and Go tiers and that the ads do not change ChatGPT answers (OpenAI)

Lyft launches teen accounts in the US more than two years after Uber, with safety features such as PIN verification, real-time tracking, and audio recordings (Samantha Subin/CNBC)

Neara, which builds digital twins of critical infrastructure to help prepare for disasters, raised a AU$90M Series D, a source says at a AU$1.1B valuation (Rhiannon Hoyle/Wall Street Journal)

Sources: Alphabet has attracted more than $100B of orders for a bond sale that's expected to be about $15B (Brian W Smith/Bloomberg)

Beast Industries, the entertainment conglomerate founded by MrBeast and last valued at $5.2B, acquires Step Mobile, a teen-focused banking app (Valida Pau/The Information)

Autodesk sues Google for allegedly infringing its Flow trademark as the name of Google's AI filmmaking tool (Jonathan Stempel/Reuters)

Monday.com's stock plunges 20%+ after the project management software company issued weak Q1 guidance, as it battles rising pressure from agentic AI tools (Samantha Subin/CNBC)

Sources: Alphabet plans to sell a rare 100-year sterling bond, as Big Tech companies borrow more to fund their capex growth; IBM sold a 100-year bond in 1996 (Financial Times)

Workday announces CEO Carl Eschenbach is stepping down and will be replaced by the company's co-founder, Aneel Bhusri, effective immediately; WDAY drops 6%+ (Ashley Capoot/CNBC)