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Sources: OpenAI is in advanced talks with PE firms including TPG and Advent to form a JV that would distribute its enterprise tools to their portfolio companies (Reuters)

Sources: OpenAI appoints new leaders to oversee Stargate after deciding to rent more AI servers from cloud providers, and splits its computing effort in three (Anissa Gardizy/The Information)

Taiwan's chip sector faces critical supply risks as the island relies on the Middle East for 37% of its LNG and much of its helium and sulfur, amid the Iran war (Bloomberg)

Apple unveils the $549 AirPods Max 2, with an H2 chip, up to 1.5x more effective ANC, studio-quality audio recording, and camera remote, shipping in early April (Apple)

Chip cooling startup Frore, which designs channels that conduct liquid coolant in 3D shapes unique to each chip, raised $143M led by MVP at a $1.64B valuation (Dina Bass/Bloomberg)

GovAI and Brookings: many of the people most at risk if AI transforms work are also the best placed to find new jobs, as researchers disagree over AI's impact (Washington Post)

Memo: Alibaba unveils Alibaba Token Hub, a new AI unit that consolidates research, consumer-facing apps, AI products, and more, as it focuses on monetizing AI (Luz Ding/Bloomberg)

Sources: OpenAI faced intense backlash from its advisory council over a planned ChatGPT "adult mode", delayed earlier in March due to technical and other issues (Wall Street Journal)

How tech billionaires are turning on the Giving Pledge, promoted by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett; Peter Thiel says he privately told ~12 signers to undo it (Theodore Schleifer/New York Times)

Nebius says Meta plans to spend up to $27B over the next five years to access AI infrastructure, starting with $12B of capacity in early 2027; NBIS jumps 12%+ (Kurt Wagner/Bloomberg)

Foxconn reports Q4 revenue up 22% YoY to ~$81B, net profit down 2% YoY to ~$1.4B, below ~$1.9B est., due to a higher tax expense, and a 5.9% gross profit margin (Sherry Qin/Wall Street Journal)

Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra review: Privacy Display works well, meaningful camera upgrades, and sleeker than the S25 Ultra, but still big, expensive, and lacks Qi2 (Allison Johnson/The Verge)

Google, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Meta, Amazon, OpenAI, Adobe, and Match sign a voluntary pledge to share threat intelligence about how scammers abuse their services (Sam Sabin/Axios)

How competition between Brazilian delivery app iFood and Meituan's Keeta in Brazil has descended into accusations of corporate espionage and shady tactics (Financial Times)

As AI models commodify, Apple's plans to spend just $14B on 2026 capex, far below hyperscalers' combined $650B, or 90%+ of their cash flow, may be a genius move (Horace Dediu/Asymco)

Sources: Hua Hong is readying a 7nm process at its Shanghai fab with Huawei's collaboration, which would make it China's second chipmaker at the node after SMIC (Fanny Potkin/Reuters)

Sources: Alibaba may unveil a Qwen-based AI agent for enterprises as soon as this week, and plans to gradually integrate the agent into its services like Alipay (Luz Ding/Bloomberg)

Spotify announces Taste Profile editing in beta, the first time it lets users fine-tune the recommendation algorithm, starting with Premium users in New Zealand (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

Sources: Microsoft cut plans to add some Copilot AI features to Windows 11 and shipped some tools without the Copilot branding, to reduce AI bloat in the OS (Zac Bowden/Windows Central)

Reliz, which operates crypto lender BlockFills, files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, reporting $50M to $100M in estimated assets and $100M to $500M in liabilities (Timmy Shen/The Block)

Google and Accel's joint AI startup accelerator Atoms picks five Indian startups from 4,000+ applications, saying ~70% of rejected applicants were AI "wrappers" (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

President Trump accuses Iran of using AI as a "disinformation weapon" to make fake images of wartime successes against the US, saying "AI can be very dangerous" (Kenrick Cai/Reuters)

Micron completes the $1.8B acquisition of Powerchip's DRAM fab in Taiwan, and plans a second fab of similar scale with construction starting by the end of FY26 (Wen-Yee Lee/Reuters)

JD.com launches online marketplace Joybuy in the UK, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg, as it expands globally to challenge Amazon (Reuters)

Q&A with Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana on accidents, why autonomous vehicles won't lead to job losses, plans to license Waymo tech to other companies, and more (Jordyn Holman/New York Times)

Standard Kernel, which is making AI-powered GPU optimization software, raised a $20M seed led by Jump Capital, with General Catalyst and others participating (Clinton Nwachukwu/Ventureburn)

Recovered notes from a lobbyist's phone outline a $5M payment structure tied to Argentine President Milei and other top officials' promotion of the Libra token (Zack Abrams/The Block)

Intellexa's founder says his firm sells surveillance tech exclusively to governments, reviving claims of state spying in Greece after being sentenced last month (Eliza Triantafillou/OCCRP)

Scanner, which helps organizations build cloud-native security data lakes for threat hunting, detection, and response, raised a $22M Series A led by Sequoia (Ionut Arghire/SecurityWeek)

Indian edtech startup upGrad plans to acquire rival Unacademy in an all-stock deal; Unacademy was valued at less than $500M in 2025, down from $3.5B in 2021 (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

Tether, flush with cash, has been investing in diverse sectors ranging from sleep tech company Eight Sleep to humanoid robotics company Neura Robotics (PitchBook)

Study: most AI-generated videos on social media about the war in Iran push pro-Iranian views, often exaggerating its military capabilities and sophistication (New York Times)

The gaming industry is shaping up to be one of the AI boom's biggest casualties, from job losses to rising console prices due to the global RAM shortage (Helen Vogelsong-Donahue/Wired)

Zendesk agrees to acquire Forethought, which makes AI-powered customer support software, for an undisclosed sum; Forethought has raised $115M (Julie Bort/TechCrunch)

San Francisco's housing market is seeing a big rebound, driven by the AI boom; Apartment List says rents rose 14% YoY in February, the fastest growth in the US (Katherine Bindley/Wall Street Journal)

Takeaways from the 2026 Game Developers Conference: a high volume of job seekers amid layoffs, AI was the hot buzzword, more outsourcing than ever, and more (Jason Schreier/Bloomberg)

A preview of Nvidia's 2026 GTC, which kicks off on March 16, where the company is expected to unveil new agentic-optimized CPUs, a CPU-only rack, and more (Katie Tarasov/CNBC)

Drones caused a Qatari Helium-producing energy hub to shutter; crucial in chipmaking, Bloomberg says the closed hub makes up ~33% of global Helium production (Ines Ferré/Yahoo Finance)

Kaiko: cumulative trading volume on crypto exchange Hyperliquid's perpetual oil futures surged to ~$7.3B on March 12 from $339M on February 28 amid the Iran war (Vicky Ge Huang/Wall Street Journal)

Sources: ByteDance suspended the global launch of Seedance 2.0 amid copyright disputes with Hollywood studios and streamers; it was launched in China last month (The Information)

A survey of 1,000 hiring managers: 59% say they stress AI's role in layoffs or hiring freezes "because it plays better"; only 9% say AI has fully replaced roles (Gautam Mukunda/Bloomberg)

TSMC's N3 logic wafer capacity has become one of the AI industry's biggest constraints, which could push customers to explore greater foundry diversification (SemiAnalysis)

An interview with SemiAnalysis CEO Dylan Patel on logic, memory, and power bottlenecks in scaling AI compute, Nvidia securing TSMC N3 allocation early, and more (Dwarkesh Patel/Dwarkesh Podcast)

An excerpt from the upcoming book Project Maven details how the Pentagon enlisted Silicon Valley to build AI-powered tools of war, now being used in Iran (Katrina Manson/Bloomberg)

Mobile internet blackouts hit Moscow as the Kremlin tightens control; Roskomnadzor data shows average daily traffic is down ~20% in March compared to February (Anastasia Stognei/Financial Times)

Palantir software demos and DOD records show how the military may be using AI chatbots, including the kinds of queries and the data used to generate responses (Caroline Haskins/Wired)

Singapore-based MetaComp, which bridges traditional fiat payment rails and stablecoin settlement infrastructure, raised $35M across two pre-Series A rounds (Timmy Shen/The Block)

A survey of 1,692 US physicians: over 80% use AI professionally and the most common use cases are medical research summarization and clinical care documentation (American Medical Association)

The US Army awards Anduril a 10-year contract worth up to $20B to buy its software, hardware, and services; the deal includes a 5-year optional ordering period (Jen Judson/Bloomberg)

A US government website shows the Commerce Department withdrew a planned rule tightening AI chip exports; a draft was sent to agencies for feedback in February (Karen Freifeld/Reuters)