Patrick Coffee / Wall Street Journal: Sources: Meta's Community Notes won't apply to paid ads, but will be enabled for organic content, which includes brands' and influencers' unpromoted posts — New system could make marketers more cautious about organic posts on Facebook and Instagram — Facebook and Instagram owner Meta …
Wall Street Journal: Blackstone invests $300M in DDN, which helps organizations store and analyze large amounts of data more efficiently for AI and HPC, at a $5B valuation — The private-equity firm's deal values California-based DDN at $5 billion — Blackstone is investing in a company that helps organizations …
Wall Street Journal: Sources: Zuckerberg demanded a review of an algorithm change after his 2023 knee surgery Facebook post got anemic attention; Meta downplays the significance — Meta follows in X's footsteps by letting users fact-check each other with ‘Community Notes’ — Social-media companies never wanted …
Preetika Rana / Wall Street Journal: Uber and Lyft are embracing autonomous vehicle operators like Waymo, May Mobility, and others, after abandoning their own self-driving car programs — After ending their own driverless plans, the ride-sharing companies are embracing autonomous-vehicle operators and offering new app features
Wall Street Journal: A look at Chinese hackers' attacks on US infrastructure and telecoms; sources: Charter, Consolidated Communications, and Windstream networks were also breached — Massive ‘Typhoon’ cyberattacks on U.S. infrastructure and telecoms sought to lay groundwork for potential conflict with Beijing …
Wall Street Journal: Many advertisers on TikTok say they will shift ad dollars if and when a US ban actually takes effect, as the yearslong saga has dulled any real sense of urgency — Status-quo videos still proliferate on the Chinese-owned app, and Madison Avenue remains upbeat just weeks before potential U.S. ban
Wall Street Journal: As Beijing pushes for self-sufficiency in the $80B+ per year car chip business, sources say the use of homemade chips in Chinese cars has risen to around 15% — U.S. objects to rival's push for self-sufficiency in $80 billion business and opens trade probe
Wall Street Journal: Philippine investigators say Alice Guo, ex-mayor of the Bamban town, owned the land on which a “pig butchering” scam center was built, housing ~3,000 scammers — WSJ got rare access to a criminal enclave in the Philippines from which Chinese gangs targeted people around the world, including Americans
Will Parker / Wall Street Journal: Some residents and lawmakers worry that the pace of Atlanta metro's data center growth, projected to hit 4,000+ MW by 2028, up 30x since 2012, has gone too far — Artificial intelligence race fuels a rush for big computing facilities that provide plenty of power
Wall Street Journal: Law enforcement officials worldwide say Chinese mafia boss Wan Kuok-koi, aka Broken Tooth, has played a central role in the emergence of “pig butchering” scams — Chinese mobster known as Broken Tooth is sanctioned by U.S. but remains free, selling swag and cutting ribbons
Wall Street Journal: What to expect in 2025: increased hype around AI agents, new generative AI-powered gadgets, better weather forecasts due to Google DeepMind's GenCast, and more — Weather forecasts will get smarter, EVs could get pricier, crypto will be for everyday investors and AI will be everywhere
Vicky Ge Huang / Wall Street Journal: A profile of Tron founder Justin Sun, who wants to be the “Elon Musk of the crypto world” and advises the Trump-backed crypto project World Liberty Financial — The Tron blockchain entrepreneur courts attention, and backs the president-elect — President-elect Donald Trump's newest ally …
Tom Dotan / Wall Street Journal: Microsoft adds Copilot to Microsoft 365 in Australia and Southeast Asia and raises 365's price, a sign of how it aims to turn a profit from its AI investments — The tech company has made Copilot part of its 365 subscription service in several markets and raised prices
Wall Street Journal: Gina Raimondo says holding back China in the chips race is a “fool's errand”, and investment, more than export controls, will keep US ahead of Beijing — Investment, more than export controls, will keep the U.S. ahead of Beijing, Commerce secretary says
Deepa Seetharaman / Wall Street Journal: Sources: OpenAI's GPT-5, codenamed Orion, is behind schedule and faces technical hurdles, including high computing costs and limited high-quality training data — OpenAI has run into problem after problem on its new artificial-intelligence project, code-named Orion
Wall Street Journal: Sources: US officials are investigating Chinese router maker TP-Link, which has an estimated 65% US market share, and could ban the sale of its routers in 2025 — TP-Link is the bestselling router on Amazon—and has been linked to Chinese cyberattacks — U.S. authorities are investigating whether …
Eliot Brown / Wall Street Journal: Masayoshi Son's $100B AI investment pledge to Trump would require a massive fundraising effort, new debt, or selling some of SoftBank's holdings to raise cash — Following through will require some combination of a massive fundraising effort, new debt or selling chunks of his company's holdings to raise cash
Edith Hancock / Wall Street Journal: The European Commission opens a formal DSA investigation into TikTok over concerns foreign actors used it to interfere in the Romanian presidential elections — The probe comes after judges in the country annulled the outcome of the first round of presidential elections, citing concerns of Russian interference
Suzanne Vranica / Wall Street Journal: Ad giants Omnicom and Interpublic's merger shows how the industry is preparing for an AI-driven upheaval, which is squeezing out creative talent — Two advertisers are combining into a $30 billion behemoth to harness the data, tech and AI expertise now dominating Madison Avenue—and all the marketing you see
Jacky Wong / Wall Street Journal: Japanese chipmaker Kioxia's dramatic valuation drop from $18B in 2018 to $5.1B in its upcoming IPO is due to its high debt and lower AI exposure than rivals — Kioxia is going for a discount due to its high debt and lower AI exposure than rivals — Japan's last blockbuster initial public offering …
Christopher Mims / Wall Street Journal: A look at Dell's evolution under Michael Dell, who has transitioned the company from a nostalgic mid-90s PC maker into a leading AI infrastructure provider — The man who founded Dell in a Texas dorm room has transformed his company. It's not just about PCs anymore.
Mauro Orru / Wall Street Journal: The UK CMA opens a formal probe into BlackRock's acquisition of UK data provider Preqin over concerns that the £2.55B deal could stifle competition in the UK — A decision is due by Feb. 12 on whether the deal warrants an in-depth investigation — U.K. antitrust officials …
Dana Mattioli / Wall Street Journal: Sources: Amazon plans to donate $1M to Trump's inaugural fund and stream the inauguration through Prime Video; a source says “Bezos is donating through Amazon” — Amazon.com is planning a $1 million donation to president-elect Donald Trump's inaugural fund …
Jessica Toonkel / Wall Street Journal: Current and former Netflix staff say the company has been scaling back employee benefits, including for parental leave, after shifting focus to profitability — Employees worry the pullback and other new restrictions mean the entertainment giant is losing the identity that fueled its success
Trefor Moss / Wall Street Journal: A profile of Vinted, a secondhand clothes app in the EU working to expand in the US that went from near collapse to a €5B valuation after a secondary share sale — Vinted is wildly popular in Europe and disproving the conventional wisdom about the resale market. Can it eventually crack the U.S.?
Steven Rosenbush / Wall Street Journal: A look at the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park, a planned project aiming to make Chicago a quantum computing hub with PsiQuantum as the anchor tenant — An industrial park taking shape on an old steel mill site provides a glimpse into the quantum future
Miles Kruppa / Wall Street Journal: A look at Chatbot Arena, which now ranks over 170 AI models and was launched in 2023 by two UCB researchers who hope to grow the project into a Wikipedia of AI — Ranking AI is tricky, so two students developed a way to make the best bots battle — BERKELEY, Calif.—Record labels have the Billboard Hot 100.
Wall Street Journal: A profile of Brain Krebs, who in the past 20 years has probed and outed some of the worst cybercriminals, including the alleged hackers of Snowflake clients — In the increasingly dangerous world of cybercrime, Brian Krebs faces threats, manipulation and the odd chess challenge
Connor Hart / Wall Street Journal: Palantir and Anduril announce a partnership to advance AI capabilities for US national security, focusing on data readiness and processing data at scale — The companies said they wish to ultimately expand the partnership to other industry partners — Palantir Technologies is partnering …
Wall Street Journal: A look at what went wrong for Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger; since Gelsinger took over in February 2021, Nvidia added $3T in market cap while Intel lost $150B — Pat Gelsinger was one of the chip pioneer's true believers. After his rescue strategy failed, the board lost confidence in him.
Drew FitzGerald / Wall Street Journal: AT&T's stock is up 35% in 2024 after CEO John Stankey reversed course in 2022 and spun off Warner Bros. and DirecTV, and plans to return $40B+ to shareholders — Investors have welcomed CEO John Stankey's return to boring wireless and broadband services after costly entertainment gambles
Edith Hancock / Wall Street Journal: A US law firm files an antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft with the UK's Competition Appeal Tribunal over how it charges users who buy services that rival Azure — The suit was filed on Tuesday with the U.K.'s Competition Appeal Tribunal by Scott+Scott — Microsoft faces a 1 billion pound …
Belle Lin / Wall Street Journal: As he kicks off his first re:Invent event, AWS CEO Matt Garman discusses upcoming “real, needle-moving” announcements, the AI landscape, Anthropic, and more — As the cloud-computing leader kicks off its re:Invent conference, Chief Executive Matt Garman says there is no end in sight to the artificial intelligence race
Wall Street Journal: The US adds new restrictions on transferring HBM chips to China, the fourth US attempt in three years to curb China, and adds 140 companies to its blacklist — Export of memory chips used in AI applications is restricted, but delayed announcement gives Chinese companies chance to stock up
Wall Street Journal: How Tony Sayegh, head of public affairs at a major TikTok investor and an official in the first Trump admin, led the effort to win Trump's support for TikTok — Tony Sayegh led the effort to win Trump's support for the popular app with ties to China — When the Biden administration …
Steven Rosenbush / Wall Street Journal: Q&A with cognitive scientist Gary Marcus on technical limitations and moral inadequacies of LLMs, constructing a regulatory framework for AI, and more — The U.S. should create an artificial intelligence agency led by a cabinet-level position, Marcus argues
Wall Street Journal: Sources: xAI plans to launch a consumer app as soon as next month; the Elon Musk-run startup build its Colossus data center, which houses 100K GPUs, in 122 days — The Tesla CEO is racing to make xAI, which launched after its competitors, the world's most advanced AI company
Thomas Gryta / Wall Street Journal: The US awards Intel up to $7.865B under the CHIPS Act to help build or expand chip plants in Arizona, New Mexico, Ohio, and Oregon, including $1B+ later in 2024 — Government grant is less than originally expected because the chip giant is also receiving separate funding for defense
Asa Fitch / Wall Street Journal: A look at the rise of super clusters that use ~100K Nvidia GPUs for training giant AI models and the new engineering challenges arising from such clusters — Musk's xAI and Meta are among firms building clusters of advanced chips — Tech titans have a new way to measure who is winning …
Isabelle Bousquette / Wall Street Journal: Six months into a deal with OpenAI, Spanish bank BBVA says staff created 2,900+ GPTs and reported productivity gains, but questions ChatGPT's scalability — The bank is evaluating its next steps after seeing early productivity gains from OpenAI's enterprise tool
Asa Fitch / Wall Street Journal: Sources: US officials are racing to deliver billions in CHIPS Act funding to Intel and others before Biden leaves office; nearly $30B is tied up in negotiations — Government officials and chip makers like Intel are in talks over billions of dollars aimed at growing domestic manufacturing
Berber Jin / Wall Street Journal: PitchBook: in 2023, US VCs returned $26B worth of shares back to investors, the lowest amount since 2011, and invested $60B more than they collected, a record — Investors hope the Trump administration will make tech acquisition deals easier — Silicon Valley's venture-capital firms …
Sarah E. Needleman / Wall Street Journal: Roblox debuts new parental controls and gatekeeping features, like letting parents link accounts to a child's and banning text chat for under 13s outside games — Videogame company has denied the allegations and says the new protections were planned before a short seller's report
Ben Cohen / Wall Street Journal: Edison: 31% of US weekly podcast listeners say YouTube is their most used platform to listen to podcasts, surpassing Spotify at 27% and Apple Podcasts at 15% — One of the most powerful companies in entertainment has become the king of podcasts because we don't just listen to people talking into microphones for hours.
Wall Street Journal: Sources detail efforts by Google and Meta to sink KOSA, which passed in the Senate almost unanimously, by dividing US House lawmakers with culture war issues — Tech giants and their allies lean on culture-war issues to splinter bipartisan support for the bill
Wall Street Journal: Ukraine's drone suppliers are using US-based Auterion's tech to ramp up production of automated attack drones that are cheap and can evade electronic jamming — Kyiv's drone suppliers are ramping up production of computer-guided drones that are cheap and can't be electronically jammed
Wall Street Journal: Sources: ByteDance is valuing itself at about $300B as part of a recent buyback offer, one of its highest valuations ever — Investors see Trump victory as a positive with threat of TikTok ban looming in U.S. — TikTok parent ByteDance is valuing itself at about $300 billion …
Wall Street Journal: Sources: T-Mobile's network was among the systems hacked by the China-linked Salt Typhoon group, and some foreign telecommunications firms were also compromised — Carrier joins growing list of known victims, including AT&T and Verizon, of the major Chinese spying operation
Wall Street Journal: X names Mahmoud Reza Banki as CFO; Banki, who Trump pardoned for making false statements in January 2021, was Tubi CFO and, a source says, joined X in November — Mahmoud Reza Banki, former Tubi finance chief, joins platform amid financial challenges — Elon Musk's X Corp. named Mahmoud …
James R. Hagerty / Wall Street Journal: Charles Sporck, an early champion of globalization who moved some of Fairchild's chip assembly operations from the US to Hong Kong in the 1960s, died at 96 — He argued that offshoring allowed the U.S. semiconductor industry to create more high-paying jobs at home