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A US grand jury indicted two former Google engineers and one of their husbands for allegedly stealing trade secrets relating to the Tensor chip for Pixel phones (Robert Burnson/Bloomberg)

Tech companies are increasingly building private power plants to fuel off-grid data centers, a move some warn has reliability challenges and hurts climate goals (Evan Halper/Washington Post)

Perplexity's retreat from ads signals a strategic shift as it recognizes its product is not for a mass audience and expects growth to come from enterprise sales (Maxwell Zeff/Wired)

Sources: Nvidia is close to finalizing an up to $30B investment into OpenAI, replacing 2025's long-term $100B commitment; the deal could be closed this weekend (Financial Times)

Los Angeles County sues Roblox, alleging it engaged in deceptive business practices that exposed children to sexual content, exploitation, and online predators (Jonathan Lloyd/NBC Los Angeles)

Sources: Meta cuts its annual distribution of stock options by ~5% for most of its staff, equating to tens of thousands of employees, after a ~10% cut in 2025 (Hannah Murphy/Financial Times)

Sources: Emerald AI, which develops software to curb data center energy demand, is raising a $25M seed extension at a ~$250M post-money valuation (Alan Neuhauser/Axios)

Sony shuts down Bluepoint Games, the PlayStation subsidiary behind remakes of older games like Demon's Souls and Uncharted; ~70 employees will lose their jobs (Jason Schreier/Bloomberg)

Meta says it is "explicitly separating" Quest VR from its Worlds platform, making Worlds "almost exclusively mobile" and setting it up to compete with Roblox (Jay Peters/The Verge)

Docs: DHS has signed a five-year, $1B blanket purchase agreement with Palantir, allowing agencies like ICE to skip the competitive bidding process (Makena Kelly/Wired)

CZ returned to the US for the first time since his 2024 prison release to attend a World Liberty Financial event at Mar-a-Lago with Brian Armstrong and others (Wall Street Journal)

Workers describe a deteriorating culture at Jack Dorsey's Block as morale plunges amid rolling layoffs and a push to use AI tools to improve productivity (Reece Rogers/Wired)

Toronto-based chip startup Taalas, which hardwires AI models into custom silicon to achieve faster inference, raised $169M, bringing its total funding to $219M (Max A. Cherney/Reuters)

Sources: AMD agrees to backstop a $300M loan from Goldman Sachs for Crusoe to buy AMD AI chips, the first known case of AMD chips used as debt collateral (The Information)

Reddit is testing an AI search feature that takes community recommendations and shows matching products from its advertisers in the results (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch)

Cleveland-based Eagle Wireless, which makes cellular modules used in IoT devices, raised a $30M Series B as the US seeks to reduce its reliance on China (Chris Metinko/Axios)

New York pulls a proposal that would have allowed for robotaxi services outside NYC, a setback for Waymo, which wants to hit 1M paid weekly US rides by 2026 end (Natalie Lung/Bloomberg)

Inside the "gay tech mafia" that mixes social and professional lives, as investors, entrepreneurs, and executives detail gay influence in Silicon Valley (Zoë Bernard/Wired)

Google rolls out Gemini 3.1 Pro, which it says is "a step forward in core reasoning", for all users in the Gemini app; the .1 increment is a first for Google (Abner Li/9to5Google)

Austin-based Ownwell, which helps homeowners appeal property taxes, raised a $50M Series B, including $30M in equity, bringing its total equity funding to $54M (Mary Ann Azevedo/Crunchbase News)

ZaiNar, a developer of a GPS alternative that uses Wi-Fi and 5G to provide location data, raised $10M at a $1B valuation, bringing its total funding to $100M (Katie Roof/The Information)

West Virginia's AG sues Apple for allegedly violating consumer protection law by not implementing tools like PhotoDNA to detect CSAM stored and shared on iCloud (Kalley Huang/New York Times)

FreeForm, which is building an AI native 3D printing system that uses 18 lasers to fuse metal powders into precision components, raised a $67M Series B (Tim Fernholz/TechCrunch)

Amsterdam-based Stacks, which builds AI software to automate accounting workflows, raised a $23M Series A led by Lightspeed, after a €10M seed in 2025 (Ryan Lawler/Axios)

ByteDance is currently hiring for nearly 100 US-based roles within its Seed AI team across San Jose, LA, and Seattle to develop LLMs, drug discovery, and more (Alexandra S. Levine/Bloomberg)

Mobile gaming company Scopely buys a majority stake in Istanbul-based studio Loom, maker of puzzle game Pixel Flow!; a source says the deal values Loom at $1B+ (Georg Szalai/The Hollywood Reporter)

Klarna reports Q4 revenue up 38% YoY to $1.08B and a $26M net loss, down from a $40M net profit in Q4 2024; KLAR is down 66%+ since its September 2025 NYSE IPO (Laith Al-Khalaf/Financial Times)

Amazon dethrones Walmart as the world's largest company by revenue, reporting $717B in 2025 sales, compared to Walmart's $713.2B for the 12 months to January 31 (Spencer Soper/Bloomberg)

Sources and docs: the US "effectively gutted" the Internet Freedom program that dispensed $500M+ since 2016 to help build tech to evade state internet controls (Aisha Down/The Guardian)

Ring founder Jamie Siminoff is on an apology tour to quell an outcry over privacy concerns after Ring's Super Bowl Search Party ad, calling it a "perfect storm" (Jordyn Holman/New York Times)

Atlassian's founders lost ~$7.2B in wealth in 2026, behind AppLovin's three founders, amid a SaaS rout; TEAM is down 45%+ YTD, the Nasdaq 100's worst performer (Bloomberg)

Sources: Uber is moving to bar drivers with convictions for violent felonies, sexual offenses, and child or elder abuse, after an NYT report in December 2025 (Emily Steel/New York Times)

Book extract: ex-Sony Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton recounts his role in sparking North Korea's 2014 hack, one of the worst cyberattacks in corporate history (Michael Lynton/Wall Street Journal)

India's AI Summit: Modi orchestrated a photo op with tech and business leaders holding hands in a line, but Sam Altman and Dario Amodei refused to clasp hands (Saritha Rai/Bloomberg)

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 ...)