Techmeme
December 22, 2025, 1:05 PM

Top News

Bloomberg:
Alphabet agrees to acquire data center company Intersect for $4.75B in cash, plus its existing debt, as part of its push to expand its AI data center footprint  —  Alphabet Inc. has agreed to buy clean energy developer Intersect Power LLC for $4.75 billion in cash, plus its existing debt …
Joe Rossignol / MacRumors:
Italy's competition watchdog fines Apple €98.6M, saying the company's ATT rules are “disproportionate” and “harmful” to app developers and advertisers  —  Italy's Competition Authority (AGCM) has imposed a €98.6 million ($116 million) fine on Apple over its App Tracking Transparency feature.
Bloomberg:
Uber and Lyft partner with Baidu to trial driverless taxis in the UK in 2026; both companies plan to use Baidu's Apollo Go RT6 robotaxis  —  Uber Technologies Inc. and Lyft Inc. are each teaming up with Baidu Inc. to trial driverless taxis in the UK, as ride-sharing companies race to deploy autonomous services around the world.
Axios:
Sources: Erebor, Palmer Luckey's digital bank, raised $350M led by Lux Capital at a $4.35B post-money valuation; it secured FDIC approval last week  —  Erebor, a new digital bank co-founded by Anduril CEO Palmer Luckey, has quietly raised $350 million at a $4.35 billion post-money valuation, Axios has learned.
More: Bloomberg
Financial Times:
Investigation: internal Binance files show it failed to stop hundreds of millions in crypto from flowing through suspicious accounts, even after a 2023 US deal  —  Leaked files show continued activity despite links to terror networks, failed ID checks and other red flags
Mitchell Peters / Billboard:
Sara Salinas / CNBC:
Paramount says Larry Ellison “agreed to provide an irrevocable personal guarantee of $40.4B” for its WBD bid, after WBD's board raised concerns about the offer  —  Paramount Skydance on Monday guaranteed the backing of billionaire Larry Ellison in an amended offer for Warner Bros. Discovery …
Chris Wack / Wall Street Journal:
Instacart scraps all item price tests after customer pushback, and won't charge different prices for the same items bought from the same store at the same time  —  Company says retailers will no longer be able to use Eversight technology to run item price tests on Instacart
Kashmir Hill / New York Times:
Some experts in the human-computer interaction field say making AI chatbots act humanlike creates cognitive dissonance for users over how much to trust them  —  I first noticed how charming ChatGPT could be last year when I turned all my decision-making over to generative A.I. for a week.

Sponsor Posts

Subquadratic:
Subquadratic: the LLM built for 12M-token reasoning  —  SubQ can reason across entire codebases and document sets in one pass with no RAG workarounds.  Read how SubQ 1.1 Small holds near-perfect retrieval out to 12M tokens.
Equals:
Stop vibe coding analytics  —  Equals AI turns questions about your business into auditable spreadsheet models and dashboards.  Build once, iterate for years.
Zoho:
Turn every support session into a data point that works for you  —  Most support teams close a session and move on.  The issue gets resolved, the ticket gets marked done, and whatever insight that session generated quietly disappears.
IDrive:
Protecting your Cloud Applications Data  —  Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Salesforce data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.

Featured Podcasts

Access:
This AI will push back if you're rude to it
A show about the tech industry's inside conversation, hosted by tech reporter Alex Heath and founder whisperer Ellis Hamburger.
Subscribe to Access.
Big Technology Podcast:
AI Pioneer Jürgen Schmidhuber: AI Already Feels Pain, Loves, and Is Self-Aware
The Big Technology Podcast takes you behind the scenes in the tech world featuring interviews with plugged-in insiders and outside agitators.
Subscribe to Big Technology Podcast.
Channels with Peter Kafka:
Inside Podcasting's Fight Over Netflix, YouTube, and Creator Control
Media and tech aren't just intersecting - they're fully intertwined. To understand how those worlds work, Peter Kafka talks to industry leaders, upstarts and observers.
Subscribe to Channels with Peter Kafka.
Uncapped with Jack Altman:
Sam Blond from Monaco
Conversations with people I admire about things I'm genuinely interested in.
Subscribe to Uncapped with Jack Altman.
Training Data:
Anthropic's Katelyn Lesse & Angela Jiang: Building an Ecosystem, not a Walled Garden
Sequoia Capital partners host conversations with leading AI builders and researchers to develop a deeper understanding of the evolving technologies and their implications.
Subscribe to Training Data.
Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith:
Connecting the Unconnected: Doreen Bogdan-Martin
Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith speaks with leaders in government, business, and culture to explore the most critical challenges at the intersection of technology and society.
Subscribe to Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith.
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 1:05 PM ET, December 22, 2025.

The most current version of the site as always is available at our home page. To view an earlier snapshot click here and then modify the date indicated.

Earlier Picks

CNBC:
@metr_evals: