Reading List

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

WitnessAI, which intercepts employees' custom GenAI models usage and applies safeguards, raised $58M led by Sound Ventures, taking its total funding to $85M (Ionut Arghire/SecurityWeek)

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The Wikimedia Foundation says Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Perplexity, and Mistral joined Wikimedia Enterprise to get "tuned" API access; Google is already a member (Emma Roth/The Verge)

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Yield Sec: the top 10 pirate sports streaming sites in the UK, largely funded by ads from unlicensed gambling operators, had 1.6B views in H1 2025, up 33% YoY (Olivia Solon/Bloomberg)

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South Korea dropped Naver's and NCSoft's teams from its competition to develop its first sovereign AI model, as LG's, SK Telecom's, and Upstage's teams advanced (Yoolim Lee/Bloomberg)

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AWS launches European Sovereign Cloud, creating a new parent company for its sovereign cloud that will be locally controlled in the EU and run by EU citizens (Arjun Kharpal/CNBC)

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TSMC projects capital spending in 2026 at between $52B and $56B, up 25%+ from 2025, and forecasts ~30% YoY revenue growth in 2026, both above analyst estimates (Bloomberg)

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Scientists say that AI has become a powerful and rapidly improving research tool, and that whether it is generating ideas on its own is, for now, a moot point (Cade Metz/New York Times)

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Chinese chipmaker SpacemiT, whose RISC-V-based K1 chip is used in industrial systems, robotics, edge computing, and AI devices, raised an ~$86M Series B (Bloomberg)

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Appfigures: global consumer mobile app spending on Apple's App Store and Google Play rose 21.6% YoY to $155.8B in 2025, but app downloads dropped 2.7% to 106.9B (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

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Microsoft agrees to buy a record 2.85M soil carbon credits from Indigo Carbon linked to regenerative US agriculture; a source values the deal at $171M to $228M (Reuters)

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Hong Kong-based WeLab, which operates two digital banks in Hong Kong and Indonesia, raised $220M in equity and debt from HSBC, Prudential Hong Kong, and others (Denise Wee/Bloomberg)

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Blockchain-based lender Figure unveils the On-Chain Public Equity Network to issue, trade, and lend stocks natively on a blockchain, not as tokenized replicas (Kyle Baird/The Block)

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Source: Apple's Gemini deal is a cloud contract where it pays Google several billion dollars; a source says OpenAI declined to be Apple's custom model provider (Financial Times)

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OpenAI quietly rolls out ChatGPT Translate, a standalone website that currently supports plain text translations across 50+ languages (Adamya Sharma/Android Authority)

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TSMC reports Q4 net profit up 35% YoY to a record ~$16B, above $15.17B est., as it benefited from surging demand for AI chips and hit $100B in 2025 revenue (Reuters)

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Sources: China is drafting rules for Nvidia H200 purchases, limiting how many chips local companies can buy and requiring them to justify the need (Nikkei Asia)

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A source close to Thinking Machines alleged that ex-CTO Barret Zoph, who is returning to OpenAI, had shared confidential company information with competitors (Maxwell Zeff/Wired)

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GlobalFoundries agrees to acquire Synopsys' ARC processor IP business, which includes ARC-V (RISC-V) and ARC CPU IP, and integrate it into its MIPS business (Nitin Dahad/EE Times)

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Bengaluru-based edtech startup Emversity raised a $30M Series A led by Premji Invest, sources say at a $120M post-money valuation, up from $60M in April 2025 (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

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Alibaba links Qwen to its online shopping and travel services, including Taobao, Alipay, Fliggy, and Amap, aiming to build a one-stop AI app for its 100M users (Luz Ding/Bloomberg)

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