Techmeme
January 26, 2026, 11:25 AM

Top News

Ryan Christoffel / 9to5Mac:
Apple unveils a second-gen AirTag with an updated speaker and the same second-gen Ultra Wideband chip as in the iPhone 17, costing $29 for one and $99 for four  —  Apple has announced a brand new AirTag 2 that's available to order now, here are the details on the update.
Axios:
As tech CEOs stay silent after two fatal shootings, 450+ workers at Google, Meta, OpenAI, Amazon, and others urge CEOs to cancel any ICE contracts and speak out  —  Some tech workers are pressuring the industry's top leaders to speak out against ICE after federal officers killed Alex Pretti …
Barbara Moens / Financial Times:
The EU opens a formal DSA investigation into xAI over Grok generating sexualized images of women and children; xAI faces fines of up to 6% of global revenue  —  European regulators begin investigation into creation and spread of sexualised images of women and children
Bloomberg:
Nvidia invests an additional $2B in CoreWeave to help speed up adding 5GW+ of AI computing capacity by 2030 and deploy Nvidia's new Vera CPU; CRWV jumps 9%+  —  Nvidia Corp., the dominant maker of artificial intelligence chips, invested an additional $2 billion in CoreWeave Inc. to help speed …
Lauren Thomas / Wall Street Journal:
Quantum computing company IonQ acquires US chipmaker SkyWater for ~$1.8B, paying $35/share, in IonQ's biggest deal yet; SkyWater will operate as a subsidiary  —  IonQ works with the U.S. government and has been on a deal spree  —  Quantum-computing company IonQ struck a deal …
Tom Warren / The Verge:
Microsoft unveils the Maia 200, its 2nd-generation AI accelerator built on TSMC's 3nm process, deploying today in its Azure US Central data center region  —  The Maia 200 chip is starting to roll out to Microsoft's data centers today. … Microsoft is announcing a successor to its first in-house AI chip today, the Maia 200.
Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge:
Intel Panther Lake laptop CPU review: the 18A-based Core Ultra X9 388H outperforms Apple's M5 and AMD's top-tier Strix Halo in some tests like 4K video exports  —  Intel's been talking the talk for months about its new generation of laptop chips, the first made on its long-anticipated 18A process.
Nat Rubio-Licht / The Deep View:
London-based enterprise AI video startup Synthesia raised a $200M Series E led by GV at a $4B valuation, up from $2.1B after raising $180M in January 2025  —  W  —  hile AI video generators like OpenAI's Sora, Google's Veo, and Kling are best known for creating “AI slop” …
Jasmine Sun / @jasmine's substack:
Claude Code can feel daunting, and most people's problems are not software-shaped, but it is clearly autonomous and the home-cooked app renaissance is great  —  are your problems software-shaped?  —  ∙ Paid  —  If you tell a friend they can now instantly create any app, they'll probably say “Cool!
Jesse Coburn / ProPublica:
Sources: the US DOT plans to use Gemini to draft federal regulations, cutting the process to just 30 days; the DOT used it to draft a still-unpublished FAA rule  —  The Transportation Department, which oversees the safety of airplanes, cars and pipelines, plans to use Google Gemini to draft new regulations.
Cade Metz / New York Times:
Ricursive, founded by ex-Google researchers to automate advanced chip design, raised $335M from Sequoia, Radical, Lightspeed, and others at a $4B valuation  —  One new start-up is called Recursive with an “e.”  Another is called Ricursive with an “i.”  They are trying to do the same thing …

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Yoolim Lee / Bloomberg:
Jason Lemkin / SaaStr: