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The Gates Foundation says Bill Gates will not deliver his keynote at India's AI Summit after "careful consideration", amid controversy over his Epstein ties (Cherylann Mollan/BBC)

Russian forces in Ukraine face communications issues as SpaceX restricts Starlink access and Telegram faces a crackdown, per pro-Russian military channels (Bloomberg)

Inside India's AI Impact Summit: 300+ exhibitors, 500 sessions, 250K visitors, billions in investment, and entrepreneurs touting solutions to real-world issues (New York Times)

Indian conglomerate Reliance plans to invest up to ~$110B to build AI-related infrastructure over the next seven years, and JioHotstar plans a ChatGPT-based bot (Bloomberg)

How Lego's Creative Play Lab built the Smart Brick, its custom chip, sensors, and proprietary communication system to seamlessly integrate with existing sets (Jeremy White/Wired)

Apple Podcasts' fresh leap into video podcasts accelerates the podcast industry's shift from an audio-centric medium to a decidedly video-focused one (Ashley Carman/Bloomberg)

A study of 12K+ EU companies finds AI adoption increases labor productivity by 4% on average in the EU, with no evidence of reduced employment in the short run (CEPR)

Nonprofit What To Fix says Facebook's content monetization program grew from under 3M to over 12M participants in just over a year; 8M+ accounts are in English (Hazel Gandhi/Rest of World)

Apple's 40-day correlation to the Nasdaq 100 fell to 0.21 last week, the lowest since 2006, making it an appealing alternative to the AI-fueled volatility (Ryan Vlastelica/Bloomberg)

US OPM Director Scott Kupor says tech billionaires like Elon Musk will give talks to the US Tech Force, which aims to recruit roughly 1,000 software engineers (Joe Miller/Financial Times)

Indian digital payments company Pine Labs plans to embed OpenAI APIs into its infrastructure to enable AI-assisted settlement, reconciliation, and invoicing (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

Sources: Accenture told executives that promotions would require "regular" AI adoption and it is tracking individual weekly AI tool logins for some senior staff (Financial Times)

India's TCS signs OpenAI as its first data center customer, starting with 100MW of capacity; Tata Group plans to deploy ChatGPT Enterprise, starting with TCS (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

Microsoft's Project Silica team details its laser-modified glass storage tech, saying tests suggest that it can preserve information for at least 10,000 years (Gayoung Lee/Gizmodo)

Samsung shares surged 5.4% to a record high after a report said the company plans to price HBM4 chips at ~$700 per unit, 30% higher than the previous generation (Kurt Schussler/Bloomberg)

Austin-based Circuit, which is building an AI platform for manufacturing and service enterprises, raised $30M from a group of angel investors (Karoline Leonard/Austin American ...)

An experiment finds X's feed algorithm favored conservative content, and switching to the For You feed shifted users' views toward more conservative positions (Ece Yildirim/Gizmodo)

Sources: OpenAI is close to finalizing the first phase of its $100B round; its overall valuation, including the eventual funding, could exceed $850B (Bloomberg)

Sources: Dylan Patel's SemiAnalysis is in early talks to raise hundreds of millions for a VC fund; Patel raised a $50M SPV toward Fluidstack's $700M fundraising (The Information)

Bluesky integrates Germ DM, an E2E encrypted messaging app built on AT Protocol, making it the first private messenger natively available in the Bluesky app (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

A US judge rules ex-Palantir employees likely violated confidentiality and non-solicitation agreements in founding Percepta, but declines to stop their work (Bob Van Voris/Bloomberg)

The UK proposes new rules requiring tech firms to remove nonconsensual abusive content within 48 hours or risk blocking and fines of up to 10% of global revenue (The Guardian)

Crypto lending firm Ledn sold $188M in securitized bonds backed by bitcoin loans, making it the first deal of its kind in the market for asset-backed debt (Bloomberg)

Cadence shares closed up 7.6% on Wednesday after the chip design company reported Q4 revenue up ~6% to $1.44B and adjusted EPS of $1.99, both above estimates (Lora Kolodny/CNBC)

Sources: the US State Department is developing an online portal at "freedom.gov" to let users in Europe and elsewhere view content banned by their governments (Reuters)

Selector, which offers an AI platform that promises to simplify network monitoring, raised a $32M Series B led by AVP at a $375M valuation (Maria Deutscher/SiliconANGLE)

Venice, which develops identity security software, emerges from stealth after raising a $25M Series A led by IVP, following an $8M seed round (Meir Orbach/CTech)

Remitly co-founder Matt Oppenheimer steps down as CEO, will be succeeded by Banco Santander executive Sebastian Gunningham (Bloomberg)

DoorDash reports Q4 revenue up 38% YoY to $3.96B, vs. $3.99B est., total orders up 32% to 903M, and forecasts Q1 adjusted EBITDA below estimates (Samantha Subin/CNBC)

eBay reports Q4 revenue up 15% YoY to $3B, vs. $2.87B est., GMV up 10% to $21.2B, and forecasts Q1 profit above estimates; EBAY jumps 6%+ after hours (Spencer Soper/Bloomberg)

Figma reports Q4 revenue up 40% YoY to $303.8M, vs. $293.15M est., and forecasts Q1 revenue above estimates; FIG jumps 15%+ after hours (Jordan Novet/CNBC)

eBay agrees to acquire secondhand clothing app Depop from Etsy for ~$1.2B in cash; Etsy bought Depop in 2021 for $1.6B; ETSY jumps 17%+ after hours (Niko Gallogly/New York Times)

Sources: Meta has revived a previously shelved smartwatch project, now code-named Malibu 2, and plans to release it in 2026 with health features and Meta AI (Jyoti Mann/The Information)

Social media addiction trial: Mark Zuckerberg says increasing engagement on Instagram is not a company goal and that Meta removes underage users it identifies (CNBC)

OpenAI and Paradigm announce EVMbench, a benchmark that measures how well AI agents can detect, exploit, and patch high-severity smart contract vulnerabilities (OpenAI)

Apple adds support for third-party voice-based conversational apps in CarPlay starting with iOS 26.4, letting CarPlay users access apps like AI chatbots (Juli Clover/MacRumors)

Efficient Computer, which is developing AI chips with a "spatial dataflow" architecture to minimize energy consumption, raised a $60M Series A (Mike Wheatley/SiliconANGLE)

Texas AG Ken Paxton sues TP-Link, alleging it deceptively markets its products as secure while allowing the CCP to hack into consumers' devices (The Record)

OpenAI hires Instagram's VP of global partnerships, Charles Porch, as its first VP of global creative partnerships, seeking to win over a skeptical Hollywood (Julia Black/Vanity Fair)

Sports-focused prediction market Novig raised a $75M Series B led by Pantera Capital at a $500M valuation; Novig is commission-free for retail traders (Leo Schwartz/Fortune)

Meta plans to spend $65M in 2026 to boost state politicians friendly to AI; filings: Meta started two super PACs, one backing the GOP and another for Democrats (New York Times)

Audible launches an "immersion reading" feature that lets readers switch between ebook and audiobook versions of a title in their Audible and Kindle libraries (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

Fei-Fei Li's World Labs raised $1B from Autodesk, a16z, Nvidia, AMD, Sea, and others to build its world models for robotics, scientific discovery, and more (Alicia Tang/Bloomberg)

Snap says its direct revenue business has hit a $1B annualized revenue run rate, driven primarily by Snapchat+ surpassing 25M subscribers since its 2022 launch (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch)

Google rolls out Lyria 3, a generative music model that can make 30-second tracks with Nano Banana-made cover art, in beta in the Gemini app in eight languages (The Keyword)

Cogent Security, which aims to use AI agents to decide which software bugs to remediate, raised a $42M Series A led by Bain, taking its total funding to $53M (Lily Mae Lazarus/Fortune)

Matthew Ball's State of Video Gaming 2026 report: global video game content sales grew 5.3% YoY to $195.6B in 2025 while job losses fell 40% YoY to 9,200 people (Sophie McEvoy/GamesIndustry.biz)

Google expands Quick Share support with AirDrop to the Pixel 9, 9 Pro, 9 Pro XL, and 9 Pro Fold, after introducing it on the Pixel 10 in November 2025 (Abner Li/9to5Google)

Kana, which builds AI marketing agents to perform data analysis, audience targeting, campaign management, and more, emerges from stealth and raised a $15M seed (Ram Iyer/TechCrunch)

OpenAI partners with six Indian education institutions, including IIT Delhi, IIM Ahmedabad, and AIIMS New Delhi, to provide ChatGPT Edu access to 100K+ students (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)