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SoftBank completed its $40 billion investment in OpenAI by transferring the final $22 billion to $22.5 billion last week, marking one of the largest private technology investments ever, according to sources.
The investment was contingent on OpenAI converting to a for-profit structure by year-end, a requirement the ChatGPT creator fulfilled in October after initially agreeing to the funding round in April at a $300 billion valuation.
To finance the commitment, SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son sold the company's entire $5.8 billion stake in Nvidia and $4.8 billion in T-Mobile stock, while also acquiring DigitalBridge for $4 billion to expand AI infrastructure capabilities.
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Alibaba's Qwen 3 was named the best open-source AI model of 2025, powering nearly half of all custom AI models globally due to its business-friendly commercial license that allows companies to maintain data privacy while running it on their own servers.
Chinese AI models captured 17.1% of global open-source downloads between August 2024 and August 2025, surpassing the U.S. share of 15.8% for the first time, according to research by MIT and Hugging Face, with Qwen and DeepSeek driving the surge.
Major American companies including Meta and Airbnb have reportedly adopted Qwen models to reduce costs, marking a reversal from 2023 when Qwen initially borrowed training methods from Meta's Llama models.
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Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron Technology are reallocating up to 40% of advanced wafer capacity from automotive chips to high-bandwidth memory for AI data centers, creating a supply crunch that could disrupt vehicle production through the decade's end.
DRAM prices for new automotive contracts could rise 70% to 100% in 2026 compared to 2025 levels, with manufacturers phasing out older DDR4 and LPDDR4 technologies still widely used in vehicle cockpit and driver assistance systems by 2028.
Automakers have a narrow two-year window to redesign vehicle systems for newer LPDDR5 memory, as the majority of cockpit and advanced driver assistance designs planned for 2028 production still rely on legacy memory types that will soon be unavailable at any price.
Key Features
* Game Mechanics: Users can place bets using virtual currency (đź’Ž) on dice rolls. The UI features a "Save and Roll" button and a dedicated field for bet entries.
* Streak System: Winnings or gameplay "series" reset after three consecutive rolls or if the user changes their bet size.
* Social & Competitive: Players can see their own win/loss record alongside the results of other users, adding a community gambling element.
* Limited Beta: Currently described as a "limited playtest" for a small group of users to gather feedback before a potential global rollout.
[!IMPORTANT]
Since these details are based on code discovery in the Beta version, the final implementation or official release may change.
Scientists are engineering tiny imperfections called nitrogen-vacancy centers into diamonds to create quantum sensors that detect magnetic fields, temperature changes, and electrical signals at room temperature, opening applications in medicine and navigation.
The technology could enable doctors to map brain activity non-invasively and allow submarines and autonomous vehicles to navigate without GPS satellites, while IonQ and Element Six, a De Beers subsidiary, announced breakthroughs in mass-producing quantum-grade diamond films in September 2025.
The shift offers a potential lifeline for the struggling diamond industry as lab-grown jewelry stones have plummeted up to 96% since 2018, with "technology diamonds" valued for engineered defects rather than clarity.
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Samsung is preparing a major update for Bixby ahead of next year's Galaxy S26 launch. While Galaxy AI is powerful, the Bixby assistant has lagged, currently leaving complex questions to Google Gemini while it handles only basic tasks.
Reports suggest Samsung will partner with Perplexity to solve this. Under the new plan, Bixby would still manage system settings. At the same time, Perplexity would handle complex, web‑based queries with citations, similar to Apple's integration with ChatGPT.
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Meta Platforms agreed to acquire Singapore-based AI startup Manus, which sells autonomous AI agents to small and medium-sized businesses, as part of CEO Mark Zuckerberg's push to build commercial products around the company's massive AI investments.
Manus reached $125 million in annual revenue run rate just eight months after launching in March 2025, making it the fastest startup to hit $100 million in annual recurring revenue, with the platform processing over 147 trillion tokens since launch.
The acquisition follows Meta's December purchase of AI wearables maker Limitless and comes as the company commits at least $70 billion in 2025 capital expenditures for AI infrastructure, with projections exceeding $100 billion next year.
IDC warned in December that PC prices could rise 4% to 8% in 2026 as a global memory shortage driven by AI data center demand threatens to contract the PC market by up to 8.9%, with Dell and Lenovo signaling price increases of up to 15%.
The crisis stems from memory makers prioritizing high-bandwidth memory production for AI infrastructure over consumer chips, with OpenAI securing agreements in October 2025 for Samsung and SK Hynix to supply up to 900,000 DRAM wafers monthly—representing over 40% of projected global capacity.
Gaming console makers are debating whether to delay the PlayStation 6 and next Xbox from their planned 2027-2028 launch window due to tight memory supplies, with industry analysts indicating relief may not arrive until late 2026 or 2027 at the earliest.
ByteDance is planning to purchase more than RMB 40 billion ($5.6 billion) worth of Huawei's Ascend AI chips in 2026, a sharp increase from nearly zero domestic chip procurement this year, with the first batch valued at tens of billions of yuan expected to enter delivery soon.
The massive order is driven by the computing power gap that emerged after Nvidia's H20 chip supply was halted in April 2025 due to U.S. export restrictions, and by explosive growth in token usage across ByteDance's Volcano Engine cloud platform and Doubao AI application, which processed over 30 trillion tokens daily by September.
The deal signals China's accelerating shift toward semiconductor self-sufficiency, with ByteDance deepening cooperation with Huawei to secure domestic computing power for its rapidly expanding AI services that command a 49.2% market share for large model services on China's public cloud.
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Visa and Mastercard have launched competing payment frameworks to enable AI shopping agents to autonomously search, compare, and complete purchases on behalf of consumers, with Visa completing hundreds of pilot transactions and predicting agentic commerce will become mainstream in 2026.
Both payment giants unveiled their protocols in October 2025, with Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol using cryptographic signatures developed with Cloudflare and Mastercard's Agent Pay framework completing U.S. rollout in November, ahead of planned global expansion in early 2026.
The infrastructure push follows OpenAI's September launch of Instant Checkout in ChatGPT, which allows purchases from Etsy and Shopify merchants without leaving the chat interface, though questions remain about liability when AI agents make purchasing errors.
CD Projekt sold its DRM-free PC storefront GOG to co-founder Michał Kiciński for approximately $25.2 million, ending the platform's 17-year tenure within the CD Projekt Group.
The divestment allows CD Projekt to focus on developing The Witcher 4, Cyberpunk 2, and a new intellectual property, with GOG continuing to operate independently under Kiciński's ownership while maintaining its DRM-free philosophy.
The companies signed a distribution agreement ensuring future CD Projekt Red titles will launch on GOG, with Kiciński pledging to preserve classic games and support titles with a retro spirit.
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AI chatbots including ChatGPT and Meta's Llama systematically discriminates against non-standard dialect speakers, showing 19% more stereotyping and 25% more demeaning content compared to standard English, according to multiple 2024-2025 studies from UC Berkeley, Cornell, and German universities.
Real-world harms include Amazon's Rufus assistants giving incorrect responses to African American English speakers, ChatGPT changing an Indian job applicant's Dalit-associated surname to a higher-caste name, and a UK council AI failing to understand a Derbyshire dialect.
Researchers warn that as AI becomes embedded in education, hiring, and government services, these biases may amplify existing discrimination, though developers say specialized models for dialect speakers and system corrections could address the problem.
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TSMC has notified customers of consecutive annual price hikes for advanced chips starting January 1, 2026, with increases of 3-10% expected through 2029 as production capacity for sub-3nm nodes remains severely constrained by AI demand.
The world's largest contract chipmaker's shares hit a record high of NT$1,530 on December 29, 2025, as investors responded to reports that tight supply and strong bookings from Nvidia, Apple, AMD, and Broadcom are driving pricing power.
TSMC's chairman stated in November that the company's advanced-node capacity falls roughly three times short of customer demand, with analysts expecting the price increases to bolster the chipmaker's traditionally weak first quarter when it holds its investor conference on January 15, 2026.
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Published
China has deployed UBTECH's Walker S2 humanoid robots at a Vietnam border crossing in Fangchenggang to guide travelers, manage crowds, patrol corridors, and inspect cargo under a $37 million contract that began deliveries in December 2025.
The Walker S2 stands 1.76 meters tall with 52 degrees of freedom and can autonomously swap its own batteries in about three minutes, enabling 24-hour continuous operation at the high-traffic border checkpoint.
The deployment represents a strategic test of humanoid robots in regulated public infrastructure, with Chinese officials positioning humanoid robotics as a key industry and planning to scale production to 10,000 units by 2027.
AI startups raised a record $150 billion in 2025, surpassing the 2021 peak of $92 billion, with major deals including OpenAI's $41 billion funding led by SoftBank and Anthropic's $13 billion September round, according to PitchBook data reported by the Financial Times.
Venture capitalists are urging founders to build "fortress balance sheets" ahead of potential market turbulence in 2026, as leading AI firms like OpenAI grow at unprecedented rates while smaller startups face dwindling funding options amid investor caution.
The funding surge has depleted cash reserves at major venture capital firms including Thrive Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and Tiger Global, which have begun raising new funds, while some analysts warn that concentrated infrastructure spending by companies like Microsoft and Meta poses valuation risks.
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China launched Jupiter I, the world's first 30-megawatt-class pure hydrogen gas turbine, which began stable power generation in Inner Mongolia on Sunday, operating entirely on hydrogen and marking a breakthrough in renewable energy storage technology.
The turbine addresses renewable energy waste by converting excess wind and solar electricity into hydrogen during off-peak hours and back to power during peak demand, with the project integrating a 500MW wind farm and photovoltaic energy systems.
Jupiter I can reduce carbon emissions by over 200,000 tonnes annually compared to thermal power units and generates enough electricity per hour to meet the daily needs of 5,500 households, according to officials at Mingyang Hydrogen Gas Turbine Technology.
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MongoDB disclosed CVE-2025-14847, dubbed MongoBleed, a high-severity vulnerability allowing unauthenticated attackers to extract sensitive data from server memory, with active exploitation confirmed shortly after a public exploit became available on December 26, 2025.
The flaw affects a broad range of MongoDB versions from legacy 3.6 through 8.2.2 due to improper handling of zlib-based network message decompression, with approximately 87,000 instances exposed worldwide and 42% of cloud environments hosting at least one vulnerable instance, according to Censys and Wiz.
MongoDB has released patches for all affected versions and recommends immediate upgrades or disabling zlib compression as a temporary workaround, while unverified reports link the vulnerability to a breach of Ubisoft's Rainbow Six Siege servers that forced the game offline.
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SK Telecom unveiled A.X K1, Korea's first hyperscale AI model with 519 billion parameters, on December 27 as part of the Korean government's Sovereign AI Foundation Model project aimed at positioning the nation among the top three global AI powers alongside the U.S. and China.
The model functions as a "Teacher Model" that transfers knowledge to smaller AI models rather than merely consuming information, and will be integrated into SK Telecom's A-Dot service with over 10 million subscribers and Liner's platform serving more than 11 million global users to advance an "AI for Everyone" framework.
The eight-member consortium—including SK hynix, Krafton, Rebellions, and Seoul National University—built the full-stack AI ecosystem using proprietary Korean technologies and plans to release A.X K1 as open-source to boost the nation's AI competitiveness.
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