Reading List

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

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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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PE firm Advent, FedEx, A&R, and PPF agree to acquire Polish automated parcel delivery company InPost for €7.8B; the company has 61K automated parcel lockers (Dominic Chopping/Wall Street Journal)

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Q&A with YouTube VP of Subscription Products Christian Oestlien on YouTube TV's future, the NFL and Oscars deals, its friendly rivalry with Netflix, and more (Lucas Shaw/Bloomberg)

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Crypto.com CEO Kris Marszalek launches ai.com during the Super Bowl and opens up username handle registration to let users get a private, personalized AI agent (Brayden Lindrea/Cointelegraph)

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A look at Tether's global expansion, after it recently hit ~300 staff; sources describe Tether's internal focus on corporate structure and "profit and loss" (Jill R Shah/Financial Times)

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A look at the 2026 Super Bowl ads from Anthropic, Amazon, OpenAI, and others, as AI continued to take center stage in ad creation and AI product promotion (Lauren Forristal/TechCrunch)

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