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Microsoft Gaming CEO Asha Sharma says she is committed to "the return of Xbox" and that the company won't "flood our ecosystem with soulless AI slop" (Sean Hollister/The Verge)

India joins Pax Silica, a US-led initiative that aims to build secure supply chains for semiconductors, advanced manufacturing, and critical technologies (Rajesh Roy/Associated Press)

Source: OpenAI is projecting that its revenue will exceed $280B in 2030; last month, OpenAI said its annualized revenue grew to $20B+ in 2025 (Shirin Ghaffary/Bloomberg)

Sources: OpenAI is telling investors it's targeting ~$600B in total compute spend by 2030, months after Sam Altman touted $1.4T in infrastructure commitments (CNBC)

Sources: OpenAI staff raised concerns about a Canadian mass shooting suspect months ago; OpenAI says her activity didn't meet the bar for reporting to police (Georgia Wells/Wall Street Journal)

Xbox President Sarah Bond, long thought to be Phil Spencer's heir, is leaving; Xbox Game Studios head Matt Booty is promoted to Chief Content Officer (Ryan McCaffrey/IGN)

Phil Spencer will retire after 38 years at Microsoft; Asha Sharma, the president of product in Microsoft's Core AI business, will become the CEO of gaming (Jordan Novet/CNBC)

Anthropic launches Claude Code Security, which "scans codebases for security vulnerabilities and suggests targeted software patches"; cybersecurity stocks fall (Ryan Vlastelica/Bloomberg)

Code Metal, which uses AI to let engineers translate legacy code into modern languages, raised a $125M Series B led by Salesforce Ventures at a $1.25B valuation (Lauren Goode/Wired)

A US judge rejects Tesla's bid to overturn a $243M jury verdict over a fatal 2019 Autopilot crash, a blow for Tesla as it faces a growing wave of lawsuits (Fred Lambert/Electrek)

Sources: Google may invest $100M in Fluidstack at a $7.5B valuation and has backstopped crypto miners that are building datacenters, seeking to expand TPU use (Wall Street Journal)

Tech stocks rise slightly from their morning lows after the Supreme Court ruled that President Trump lacked the authority to impose sweeping global tariffs (Adam Levine/Barron's Online)

Peak XV, which split from Sequoia in 2023, raised $1.3B across new India- and Asia-focused funds, bringing its total assets under management to over $10B (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

Claude's C Compiler shows AI elevates the role of human judgment and vision; it's a milestone, but closely mirrors LLVM/GCC, and hard codes things to pass tests (Chris Lattner/Modular Blog)

Sources: OpenAI has 200+ people working on AI devices, including a smart speaker with a camera costing $200 to $300, possibly smart glasses and a smart lamp (The Information)

Avantos, which makes an AI-native client management system for financial institutions, raised a $25M Series A led by Bessemer, taking its total funding to $35M (Minh Le/Tech in Asia)

OpenAI says users aged 18 to 24 account for nearly 50% and under-30s represent 80% of ChatGPT messages in India; 35% of chats are related to professional tasks (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

Pepper, which offers a digital storefront for independent food distributors, raised a $50M Series C led by Lead Edge Capital, taking its total funding to $100M (Chris Metinko/Axios)

Scott Myers, the head of Snap's AR glasses subsidiary Specs, leaves after six years; sources say Myers left after a "blow-up" with Evan Spiegel over strategy (Alex Heath/Sources)

Sources: SoftBank plans to form a consortium to build a $33B power plant in Ohio, set to produce 9.2 GW for AI data centers, as part of the US-Japan trade deal (Nikkei Asia)

General Catalyst plans to invest $5B in India over five years, an increase from the $500M to $1B it previously announced, after merging with a local VC in 2024 (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

Google rejected 1.75M policy-violating Android apps and blocked 80K+ developer accounts from Google Play in 2025, down from 2.36M apps and 158K accounts in 2024 (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

Sources: Amazon's AI tools have caused at least two AWS outages, including a 13-hour disruption in December; Amazon says it was "user error, not AI error" (Rafe Rosner-Uddin/Financial Times)

Microsoft's AI safety team proposed technical standards for detecting AI-generated content, but its CSO declined to commit to using them across its platforms (James O'Donnell/MIT Technology Review)

How some political candidates and activists across ideologies and professions are pushing back on the spread of data centers and AI in the US (Andrew R. Chow/Time)

Uber's market cap fell to ~$150B, down ~25% in six months, as investors weigh robotaxi disruption and see the market as a two-horse race between Waymo and Tesla (Dan Gallagher/Wall Street Journal)

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)