US companies sold $1.7T of investment-grade bonds in 2025, nearing the $1.8T 2020 record, driven by AI infrastructure borrowing; Goldman says AI makes up ~30% (Kate Duguid/Financial Times)
Tech Blog
Published on 2025-12-23
Despite concerns, Labour MPs and other left-wing UK politicians stay active on X; the UK government says it stopped paid ads on X in 2024, down from £9M in 2021 (Financial Times)
HK shares of Chinese short-video app Kuaishou fell as much as 6% to ~$8, lowest since November 21, after the company was hit by a cyberattack on December 22 (Reuters)
Sources reveal inconsistencies in Megaspeed's chip inventory, as the US probes the Singapore AI startup over alleged Chinese ownership and Nvidia chip smuggling (Bloomberg)
The Pentagon partners with xAI to embed the company's frontier AI systems, based on the Grok family of models, directly into GenAI.mil as soon as early 2026 (Bonny Chu/Fox News)
The US FCC bans imports, marketing, and sales of new foreign-made drones and components, including from China's DJI and Autel, citing national security concerns (Heather Somerville/Wall Street Journal)
Sources: ByteDance has made preliminary plans to spend ¥160B, or ~$23B, in AI capex in 2026, up from ¥150B in 2025, and has budgeted ~$12.07B for AI processors (Financial Times)
Kargo, which uses cameras and sensors to inspect pallets in a warehouse and provide accurate inventory data, raised a $42M Series B led by Avenir (Colin Campbell/Axios)
OpenAI details efforts to secure its ChatGPT Atlas browser against prompt injection attacks, including building an "LLM-based automated attacker" (Rebecca Bellan/TechCrunch)
Published on 2025-12-22
Coinbase agrees to acquire prediction markets startup The Clearing Company for an undisclosed sum; the startup was founded in 2025 and raised a $15M seed (Yogita Khatri/The Block)
