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December 26, 2025, 2:40 AM

December 26, 2025

2:00 AM •	Rafe Rosner-Uddin / Financial Times: The top 10 US tech billionaires collectively added $550B+ to their combined net worth in 2025, reaching $2.5T by December 24, up from $1.9T at the year's start
12:55 AM •	Reuters: Chinese state media: China launches three VC funds of $7.1B+ each to back early-stage “hard technology” startups valued below ¥500M, or about $71M
12:05 AM •	Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez / Fortune: Cursor CEO Michael Truell warns that “vibe coding” advanced projects may create “shaky foundations” and eventually “things start to kind of crumble”

December 25, 2025

9:45 PM •	Annie Palmer / CNBC: As startups flood the market with AI shopping agents, Amazon is playing defense by blocking agents' access to its site and investing heavily in its own tools
7:05 PM •	Aishvarya Kavi / New York Times: A US judge temporarily blocks the Trump administration from detaining CCDH CEO Imran Ahmed, one of the Europeans the US barred on claims of promoting censorship
6:00 PM •	Finian Hazen / MIT Technology Review: An interview with Citizen Lab founder Ronald Deibert about the US adopting authoritarian digital practices, the research group's accomplishments, and more
4:20 PM •	Hartley Charlton / MacRumors: Apple settles with a Brazilian regulator to allow alternative app stores; report: Apple will charge a 5% fee for alt app stores and 15% on App Store link-outs
2:40 PM •	Siddharth / GSMArena.com: Xiaomi unveils the $995+ Xiaomi 17 Ultra in China with a 200MP periscope camera, a 50MP 1" sensor, and an ultrawide; Leica edition gets a mechanical zoom ring
12:50 PM •	Alicia Park / Forbes: AI sector minted 50+ new billionaires in 2025; Crunchbase: investors poured $200B+ into AI startups in 2025, or about 50% of global funding, up from 34% in 2024
10:30 AM •	Jack Ewing / New York Times: Tesla's robotaxi service in Austin significantly trails Waymo, deploying an estimated 30 cars with safety drivers, vs. Waymo's 200 cars without human monitors
8:25 AM •	Lisa Bonos / Washington Post: A look at the humans employed to rescue robotaxis; Waymo uses the Honk app to pay $20 to $24 to manually close robotaxi doors and $60 to $80 to tow its cars
6:50 AM •	Paresh Dave / Wired: A look at Detroit's Apple Developer Academy, launched after the BLM protests, which spends $20K per student, nearly 2x the budget of local community colleges
4:05 AM •	Nikou Asgari / Financial Times: PitchBook: crypto M&A hit $8.6B across 267 deals in 2025 vs. $2.17B in 2024; 11 crypto IPOs raised $14.6B worldwide, up from $310M from four IPOs in 2024
2:00 AM •	Theodore Schleifer / New York Times: How Larry Ellison is helping his son David build a media empire, including making the case to Trump for why Paramount, not Netflix, should acquire WBD
1:00 AM •	The Information: Sources: Nvidia's licensing deal with Groq, which has raised ~$1.8B, includes payouts to Groq's key execs and investors, including BlackRock and Tiger Global
12:05 AM •	Takehiro Hasegawa / Nikkei Asia: A teardown of Huawei's Mate 70 Pro and Pura 80 Pro shows 57% of components were made in China; similarly priced Huawei phones in 2023 had 32% Chinese components

December 24, 2025

9:40 PM •	Sandro Iannaccone / Wired: Q&A with Google DeepMind VP of Research Pushmeet Kohli on launching AlphaFold 2 five years ago, hallucinations, building an “AI co-scientist”, and more
7:50 PM •	Eudora Wang / DealStreetAsia: Chinese humanoid robot startup Galbot raised over $300M led by China Mobile's industry investment fund at a $3B valuation, bringing its total funding to $800M
5:15 PM •	Ian King / Bloomberg: Nvidia agrees to a licensing deal with Groq; CEO Jonathan Ross and other top executives will join Nvidia; Groq says it will continue operating independently
4:02 PM •	David Faber / CNBC: Disruptive CEO Alex Davis says Nvidia has agreed to buy assets from Groq for $20B in cash; leaked email: Jensen Huang says Nvidia is not acquiring Groq
2:35 PM •	Tabby Kinder / Financial Times: Analysis: Oracle has moved $66B of debt for building AI data centers off its balance sheet using SPVs; Meta has moved $30B, xAI moved $20B, and CoreWeave $2.6B
12:05 PM •	Adam Satariano / New York Times: The Trump administration's travel ban on five Europeans includes researchers working to tackle online disinformation and abuse, like CCDH founder Imran Ahmed
11:20 AM •	Eunice Xu / South China Morning Post: Beijing-based DP Technology, which develops AI tools used by researchers for tasks like computer-aided drug design and battery design, raised a ~$114M Series C
9:20 AM •	The Information: Sources: OpenAI staff discussed prioritizing sponsored content in ChatGPT when users ask relevant queries and created mockups with ads in sidebars or as pop-ups
8:30 AM •	Lorne Cook / Associated Press: The EU warns of possible action after the US imposes travel bans on five Europeans, saying it will defend its “regulatory autonomy against unjustified measures”
6:50 AM •	Reuters: How CEO Lip-Bu Tan gave Intel a lifeline after meeting with Trump in August; sources say Nvidia tested Intel's 18A to make chips but stopped moving forward
6:20 AM •	Sana Pashankar / Bloomberg: AST launches its largest-ever satellite from India, hosting the BlueBird Block-2, the first in a series of deployments to challenge SpaceX in satellite internet
5:45 AM •	Elvira Pollina / Reuters: Italy's antitrust authority orders Meta to suspend contractual terms that bar rival AI chatbots from WhatsApp; Meta calls the decision “fundamentally flawed”
5:15 AM •	Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai / TechCrunch: Chainalysis and TRM Labs estimate that $2.7B was stolen in crypto in 2025 in total, up from $2.2B in 2024; the biggest hack was the $1.4B breach at Bybit
4:30 AM •	Kiran Rathee / The Economic Times: Sources: India raises concerns about the misuse of Indian phone numbers on WhatsApp, which banned 9.8M Indian accounts per month on average in 2025 to October
4:00 AM •	New York Times: A look at the growing reliance of US data centers and the Pentagon on Chinese batteries, a dependence increasingly viewed as a national security threat
2:30 AM •	John Koblin / New York Times: YouTube dominates daytime TV streaming, with 6.3M viewers at 11am in October on average, above Netflix's 2.8M, per Nielsen; prime-time viewership is more even
1:50 AM •	Vicky Ge Huang / Wall Street Journal: Bitcoin miners that are retooling data centers for AI have boosted their stocks; the CoinShares Bitcoin Mining ETF is up ~90% YTD even as bitcoin has slumped
1:05 AM •	Politico: Over the past month, the US paused talks on a tech pact with the UK, canceled a South Korea trade meeting, and threatened the EU over Big Tech regulations
12:10 AM •	Stu Woo / Wall Street Journal: Sources: China's AI regulations, which require chatbots to pass a 2,000-question ideological test, have spawned specialized agencies that help AI companies pass

December 23, 2025

11:55 PM •	Urvi Malvania / Financial Express: HCLSoftware, a subsidiary of Indian IT company HCLTech, agrees to acquire business intelligence company Jaspersoft from Cloud Software Group for $240M in cash
11:35 PM •	Ari Levy / CNBC: Waymo says it is updating its fleet to improve navigation during widespread outages, after pausing its service during blackouts in San Francisco on December 20
9:30 PM •	Heo Kyungjun / The Asia Business Daily: South Korean prosecutors allege China's CXMT mass-produced 10nm-class DRAM using leaked Samsung tech, indicting 10 employees who previously worked for Samsung
8:30 PM •	Polly Thompson / Business Insider: Starlink says it hit 9M “active customers” across 155 countries, territories, and other markets, up from 8M in November, 7M in August, and 4.6M in December 2024
7:45 PM •	Aime Williams / Financial Times: The Trump administration plans to replace the lottery system for H-1B visas with a “weighted” system prioritizing higher-paid individuals, starting February 27
7:25 PM •	The Information: Sources: Snowflake is in talks to buy app monitoring startup Observe for around $1B; Observe has raised more than $470M
6:05 PM •	Prakhar Srivastava / Reuters: Fleet management software provider Motive files for a US IPO, reporting a $138.5M net loss on $327.3M in revenue for the nine months ended September 30
5:20 PM •	Fatima Hussein / Associated Press: The US imposes visa restrictions on five Europeans, including Thierry Breton, accusing them of pressuring US tech companies to censor certain US viewpoints
2:45 PM •	Marina Temkin / TechCrunch: Marissa Mayer's new startup Dazzle, which is building next-gen AI personal assistants, raised an $8M seed at a $35M valuation and plans to exit stealth in 2026
1:35 PM •	Lauren Feiner / The Verge: A US federal judge grants a temporary injunction blocking a Texas law requiring mobile app stores to verify users' ages from taking effect on January 1
1:00 PM •	Devindra Hardawar / Engadget: Xbox had a terrible 2025: Microsoft canceled games and raised console and Game Pass prices, Costco stopped selling Xbox, and Valve's Steam Machine upstaged it
12:00 PM •	Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch: Lemon Slice, which launched a 20B-parameter model that creates digital avatars for AI agents, streaming video at 20 FPS on a single GPU, raised a $10.5M seed
11:05 AM •	Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai / TechCrunch: France's La Poste says it has suffered a suspected DDoS attack in “a major network incident” on December 22, which disrupted its postal and banking services
10:25 AM •	Jordan Fabian / Bloomberg Law: After a yearlong review, the US says China is engaging in unfair chip trade practices, but holds off on additional chip import tariffs at least until mid-2027
9:30 AM •	Reuters: US plans to impose tariffs on Chinese chips in mid-2027, USTR says
9:20 AM •	Bloomberg: ServiceNow agrees to acquire cybersecurity startup Armis for $7.75B in cash in a deal set to close in H2 2026, marking its largest acquisition to date
9:10 AM •	Yueqi Yang / The Information: Brett Harrison, the former president of FTX US, raised a $35M Series A for his new perpetual futures exchange AX, a source says at a $187M valuation
8:15 AM •	Reece Rogers / Wired: Google's Nano Banana Pro and OpenAI's ChatGPT Images can make nonconsensual bikini deepfakes from photos of fully clothed women; Reddit bans r/ChatGPTJailbreak
7:45 AM •	Angus Whitley / Bloomberg: The Canada Pension Plan Board and Australia's Goodman agree to invest $2.6B+ in data centers in Frankfurt, Amsterdam, and Paris, starting to build in June 2026
7:15 AM •	MiniMax: China's MiniMax releases M2.1, an upgrade to its open-source M2 model that it says has “significantly enhanced” coding capabilities in Rust, Java, and others
6:30 AM •	Keith Bradsher / New York Times: Chinese automakers delay plans to mass-produce self-driving vehicles as Beijing becomes more cautious, after a fatal Xiaomi crash in March caused public concern
5:55 AM •	Juli Clover / MacRumors: The European Commission says Apple will bring AirPods-like pairing and iPhone notification access to third-party devices under the DMA in iOS 26.3 in 2026
5:35 AM •	Bloomberg: Samsung's Harman agrees to acquire ZF's radar and automotive computing driver-assistance business for €1.5B, as the European auto-supplier sector struggles
5:00 AM •	Ivan Zhao / @ivanhzhao: How AI can work across scales, from individuals to organizations to economies, like steel and the steam engine before it, as AI arrives as “infinite minds”
2:15 AM •	Kate Duguid / Financial Times: US companies sold $1.7T of investment-grade bonds in 2025, nearing the $1.8T 2020 record, driven by AI infrastructure borrowing; Goldman says AI makes up ~30%
1:15 AM •	Financial Times: Despite concerns, Labour MPs and other left-wing UK politicians stay active on X; the UK government says it stopped paid ads in 2024, after spending £9M in 2021
12:55 AM •	Reuters: Chinese short-video app Kuaishou's Hong Kong stock fell as much as 6% to ~$8, the lowest since November 21, after it was hit by a cyberattack on December 22
12:00 AM •	Bloomberg: Sources reveal inconsistencies in Megaspeed's chip inventory, as the US probes the Singapore AI startup over alleged Chinese ownership and Nvidia chip smuggling

December 22, 2025

9:55 PM •	Bonny Chu / Fox News: The Pentagon partners with xAI to embed the company's frontier AI systems, based on the Grok family of models, directly into GenAI.mil as soon as early 2026
9:20 PM •	Heather Somerville / Wall Street Journal: The US FCC bans imports, marketing, and sales of new foreign-made drones and components, including from China's DJI and Autel, citing national security concerns
8:40 PM •	Financial Times: Sources: ByteDance has made preliminary plans to spend ~$23B in AI capex in 2026, up from ~$20B in 2025, and has budgeted ~$12B for AI processors
8:05 PM •	Colin Campbell / Axios: Kargo, which uses cameras and sensors to inspect pallets in a warehouse and provide accurate inventory data, raised a $42M Series B led by Avenir
6:45 PM •	Rebecca Bellan / TechCrunch: OpenAI details efforts to secure its ChatGPT Atlas browser against prompt injection attacks, including building an “LLM-based automated attacker”
5:50 PM •	Yogita Khatri / The Block: Coinbase agrees to acquire prediction markets startup The Clearing Company for an undisclosed sum; the startup was founded in 2025 and raised a $15M seed
4:10 PM •	The Information: Sources: Nvidia's DGX Cloud is merging with the engineering unit, pivoting from selling cloud services to enterprises to supporting internal AI development
3:10 PM •	NBC Los Angeles: Vince Zampella, head of EA-owned Respawn Entertainment, ex-CEO of Infinity Ward, and co-creator of Call of Duty, died on December 21 at 55 in a single-car crash
2:35 PM •	Z.ai: Chinese AI startup Z.ai releases GLM-4.7, an open-weight model that Z.ai says delivers significant improvements in coding performance compared to GLM-4.6
2:20 PM •	Sarah Perez / TechCrunch: OpenAI rolls out Your Year with ChatGPT, a Spotify Wrapped-like feature, to Free, Plus, and Pro users in the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand
1:30 PM •	Denitsa Tsekova / Bloomberg: FanDuel and CME Group launch a prediction market app called FanDuel Predicts in five US states, just days after DraftKings rolled out a similar product
12:40 PM •	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
12:10 PM •	Axios: Sources: Erebor, Palmer Luckey's digital bank, raised $350M led by Lux Capital at a $4.35B post-money valuation; Erebor secured US FDIC approval last week
11:20 AM •	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
8:45 AM •	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
8:10 AM •	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
8:00 AM •	Emily Steel / New York Times: Investigation: in 22 US states, Uber approves drivers with many types of convictions, such as violent felonies, that are over seven years old to keep costs low
7:30 AM •	Reuters: Sources: Nvidia plans to begin shipping its H200 chips to China before mid-February 2026 and expects initial shipments to be ~40,000 to 80,000 H200 units
7:00 AM •	Sherry Qin / Wall Street Journal: Chinese AI chipmaker Biren Technology plans to raise up to ~$623M in a Hong Kong IPO, pricing shares at ~$2.19 to ~$2.52, and expects trading to start January 2
6:45 AM •	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
6:30 AM •	Abram Brown / The Information: Sequoia, a16z, and other VC firms invested $1.2B+ into police and public safety tech startups over the past year, following the success of Palantir and others
6:10 AM •	Bloomberg: How the global AI boom is driven by thousands of newcomers, diluting Big Tech's infrastructure dominance; US data center credit deals hit $178.5B in 2025 so far
5:10 AM •	Bloomberg: Filings: Chinese AI startups Zhipu and MiniMax report 2024 revenue of $44.4M and $30.5M, respectively, as both prepare for Hong Kong IPOs in the coming weeks
4:50 AM •	SiliconANGLE: Google's TPUs and Gemini are competitive, but Nvidia's and OpenAI's first-mover advantage makes their lead seem durable and Google faces the innovator's dilemma
4:30 AM •	Thomas Brewster / Forbes: Some US schools are deploying AI surveillance tech like facial recognition and listening devices; critics say there is little evidence they make school safer
4:10 AM •	The Chip Letter: A look at Google's TPU evolution, its decision to sell chips to competitors after 12 years of internal use, the TPU vs. GPU architecture showdown, and more
1:40 AM •	Connie Loizos / TechCrunch: Q&A with iRobot co-founder Colin Angle on the company's Chapter 11 bankruptcy, regulatory pressure that killed Amazon's deal, his new robotics startup, and more
12:40 AM •	Max Tani / Semafor: Adam Mosseri says “maybe we'll need” premium longform video for Instagram, and that TikTok's US sale turmoil has given Meta time to retune algorithms

December 21, 2025

11:50 PM •	CNBC: Waymo resumes its robotaxi service in SF after suspending it during a blackout, and says most trips finished before vehicles returned to depots or pulled over
11:15 PM •	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
8:45 PM •	Mitchell Peters / Billboard: Pirate activist group Anna's Archive says it scraped 86M music files and 256M rows of track metadata from Spotify, and releases them in ~300TB of torrent files
6:40 PM •	Jessica Mathews / Fortune: A look at military tech startup Shield AI, recently valued at $5.6B, and its new CEO Gary Steele, who aims to grow annual revenue from $300M to $1B by 2028
4:45 PM •	Ryan Gould / Bloomberg: Private equity firms led by Permira and Warburg Pincus agree to buy Clearwater Analytics, in a deal valuing the financial software maker at $8.4B including debt
3:20 PM •	Ionut Arghire / SecurityWeek: Echo, which uses AI agents to build Docker images that eliminate vulnerabilities at the source, raised a $35M Series A, bringing its total funding to $50M
1:25 PM •	John Sakellariadis / Politico: Sources: DHS is investigating whether six staffers misled CISA's acting director into taking a polygraph that he failed, compounding instability at the agency
1:15 PM •	Sri Muppidi / The Information: Source: OpenAI's share of revenue after the cost of running AI models for paying users has jumped to ~70% in October, up from ~52% at the end of 2024
9:40 AM •	Politico: Sources: tech lobbyists say that David Sacks' push for an EO blocking state AI laws undercut their efforts to craft a permanent, bipartisan federal solution

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