Techmeme
December 31, 2025, 2:25 AM

Top News

Wall Street Journal:
Sources: Meta is buying Manus for $2B+; Manus was raising at a $2B valuation when Meta approached it; Manus CEO Xiao Hong will report to Meta COO Javier Olivan  —  The deal for more than $2 billion is one of the first in which a major U.S. tech company has bought a startup with Chinese roots
M.G. Siegler / Spyglass:
Meta just bought into the enterprise market with its Manus deal, which may eventually help it expand into cloud offerings like those of its Big Tech peers  —  Between Apple and Meta, I think it was a pretty close call in terms of which Big Tech company had the worse 2025 when it came to AI.
Jeanny Yu / Bloomberg:
Chinese AI firms are leading a wave of IPOs in Hong Kong, where at least 25 companies debuted in December 2025, the busiest month for deals since November 2019  —  Chinese artificial intelligence firms are leading a wave of listings in Hong Kong, aiming to capitalize on a recent market momentum.
Themis Qi / South China Morning Post:
Kurt Wagner / Bloomberg:
Elon Musk says xAI bought a third building called “MACROHARDRR”, reportedly adjacent to Colossus 2, that will take the company's training compute to almost 2GW  —  Elon Musk's xAI is planning an expansion of its massive data center complex in Memphis, and has purchased a third building …
Vlad Savov / Bloomberg:
Review of Samsung's Galaxy Z TriFold: sturdy but poor camera performance and has some unique design flaws that make it even less polished than regular foldables  —  Review: The $2,500 Galaxy Z TriFold is pricier than other foldables and also less polished.  —  Nearly seven years in …
SoftBank Group Corp.:
SoftBank says it has completed a $22.5B investment in OpenAI, finalizing its up to $40B investment commitment announced in March and taking its stake to ~11%  —  SoftBank Group Corp. ("SBG" or the “Company") today announced that it has completed an additional investment of $22.5 billion …
CTech:
Sources: Nvidia is in advanced talks to acquire Tel Aviv-based AI21, which is building its own LLMs, for $2B to $3B; the deal would resemble an acquihire  —  EXCLUSIVE: The move would mark Nvidia's fourth major Israeli purchase and signal the limits of Israel's LLM ambitions.
Suzanne Smalley / The Record:
The US Treasury has lifted sanctions on three executives tied to spyware maker Intellexa, reversing a designation imposed by the Biden administration in 2024  —  The Treasury Department on Tuesday took three people closely affiliated with the holding company behind Predator spyware off of a sanctions list …
Zak Killian / Tom's Hardware:
IDC expects shipments of PCs could shrink by up to 9% YoY in 2026 due to global memory shortages, as demand from AI data centers continues to outstrip supply  —  Memory shortages are expected to have a serious impact on the PC and smartphone market. … The International Data Corporation …
Sergiu Gatlan / BleepingComputer:
Two ex-staffers of cybersecurity incident response companies Sygnia and DigitalMint plead guilty to targeting US companies in 2023's BlackCat ransomware attacks  —  Two former employees of cybersecurity incident response companies Sygnia and DigitalMint have pleaded guilty to targeting U.S. companies …
Zhengdong Wang:
A reflection on AI advances in the past decade and how scaling and time-horizon trends might point to far greater capabilities in the decade ahead  —  People love to predict the future.  Back in June, Peter Thiel recounted a conversation he had with Elon Musk.

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Osmond Chia / BBC:
Reuters:
Vikki Blake / Eurogamer.net: