Reading List

The most recent articles from a list of feeds I subscribe to.

Sources: Alphabet plans to sell a rare 100-year sterling bond, as Big Tech companies borrow more to fund their capex growth; IBM sold a 100-year bond in 1996 (Financial Times)

Techmeme

Workday announces CEO Carl Eschenbach is stepping down and will be replaced by the company's co-founder, Aneel Bhusri, effective immediately; WDAY drops 6%+ (Ashley Capoot/CNBC)

Techmeme

Databricks raised $5B in equity financing and $2B in debt at a $134B valuation and says its annualized revenue crossed $5.4B for the January quarter, up 65% YoY (Jordan Novet/CNBC)

Techmeme

EU officials and tech executives inaugurate a €2.5B chips research hub in Belgium; ASML and Imec emphasized that the US is dependent on European chip tech (Pieter Haeck/Politico)

Techmeme

Gather AI, which builds "curious" AI for drones and cameras to autonomously monitor warehouses, raised a $40M Series B, taking its total funding to $74M (Julie Bort/TechCrunch)

Techmeme

Source: Apollo nears a ~$3.4B loan deal to a Valor-led investment vehicle to buy Nvidia chips for leasing to xAI; through fall 2025, xAI was burning $1B+/month (Miles Kruppa/The Information)

Techmeme

Discord says it will roll out age verification globally from March to access some content; all accounts will have a "teen-appropriate experience by default" (Stevie Bonifield/The Verge)

Techmeme

Uber agrees to acquire Getir's delivery operations from Mubadala for $335M in cash and says it will take a 15% stake in the remaining portfolio for $100M (Bloomberg)

Techmeme

How Oura won over DC by growing its lobbying spend to $1M+ per year, as RFK Jr. touts wearables for health and the US DOD makes the rings an employee benefit (Amanda Chu/Politico)

Techmeme

Sources: Alphabet aims to raise ~$15B from a US high-grade dollar bond sale, as it seeks to finance $185B in 2026 capex; Alphabet raised $17.5B in November 2025 (Bloomberg)

Techmeme

Slack message: Sam Altman tells staff that ChatGPT is "back to exceeding 10% monthly growth", and OpenAI plans to release "an updated Chat model" this week (CNBC)

Techmeme

Alibaba's Qwen temporarily stops issuing coupons due to customer overload, hampering Alibaba's Agentic AI ad campaign; Qwen began offering coupons on February 6 (Eduardo Baptista/Reuters)

Techmeme

Sources: AI legal software startup Harvey seeks to raise $200M led by Sequoia and GIC at an $11B valuation, up from $8B after raising $160M in December 2025 (Iain Martin/Forbes)

Techmeme

How the US government is adopting AI: NASA reports 420 AI use cases in 2025, up from 18 in 2024, HHS reports 398, Energy 325, DOJ 295, Interior 234, and DHS 205 (Washington Post)

Techmeme

A profile of Amanda Askell, Anthropic's resident philosopher, who is learning Claude's reasoning patterns in a bid to endow the chatbot with a sense of morality (Wall Street Journal)

Techmeme

ByteDance debuts Seedance 2.0, a new version of its AI video generation model that can produce multi-shot scenes, available to select Jimeng and Jianying users (Juro Osawa/The Information)

Techmeme

Franco-Italian chipmaker STMicro agrees to supply AWS with various chips, including for high-bandwidth connectivity and power management; STM jumps 5%+ (Christina Kyriasoglou/Bloomberg)

Techmeme

Chinese chip designer Montage raised $902M in its Hong Kong IPO, jumping 64% in its market debut, the biggest rise since Kuaishou's $6.2B Hong Kong IPO in 2021 (Julia Zhong/Bloomberg)

Techmeme

YouTube launches a Premium paywall for song lyrics on YouTube Music, after testing it in recent months; users get five free lyrics before they have to subscribe (Abner Li/9to5Google)

Techmeme

The European Commission sends a statement of objections to Meta over WhatsApp blocking rival AI chatbots, warning it will take measures to avoid "serious" harm (Bloomberg)

Techmeme