This Week in Tech (Week Ending Dec 19, 2025)
TL;DR - 🤝 lots of M&A activity for Tiktok, Coursera and WBD before Christmas
Hey folks!
Happy Friday 😎! I’ll be off the next 2 weeks - see you in 2026! Tech news below:
TL;DR -
Quite a bit of M&A activity leading up to the holiday week: TikTok has signed a deal to divest its U.S. entity to a joint venture controlled by American investors. Coursera and Udemy enter a merger agreement valued at around $2.5B. Warner Bros. Discovery’s board rejected Paramount’s hostile bid. More below
Amazon is in talks to invest $10 billion or more in OpenAI at a valuation exceeding $500 billion
Lovable raised $330M at a $6.6B valuation. Lovable has seen its valuation more than triple just five months after the company’s last funding round in July
🏆Check out the Oscar frontrunners below
🌎 Macro (Economic) and Trends
😢Two tragic shootings occurred:
a shooting at Bondi Beach, Australia, targeting a Jewish gathering on the first day of Hanukkah, where at least 15 people were killed and 40 were wounded. Later news revealed that the terrorist attack was linked to ISIS.
at Brown University, where a gunman killed 2 people and injured 9 others.
The unemployment rate increased last month to 4.6 percent — the highest it has been since September 2021, when the economy was emerging from the pandemic. The data is a concerning sign for people in search of jobs
🇻🇪The U.S. is preparing to seize more sanctioned oil tankers off Venezuela as the Trump administration opens a new phase of its pressure campaign on Nicolas Maduro’s regime.
Elon Musk has begun funding GOP House and Senate campaigns for the 2026 midterms — an indication his relationship with President Trump has thawed since their messy breakup earlier this year.
📺Trend - Social media platforms are expanding to TV as people spend more time watching short-form videos from their couches, not just on their phones.
Why it matters: Connected TV ad spending is growing faster than social video, representing a lucrative new ad market for social media companies.
Instagram announced a pilot for a TV app to watch its short-form videos, Reels. The app is only available on Amazon Fire TV devices in the U.S., for now.
Pinterest is buying tvScientific, a CTV ad buying platform, to expand its reach into living rooms.
📰Trend - publishers joining Substack: The Wall Street Journal launched “Free Expression,” a newsletter-focused opinion brand that is available via its own channels and Substack. Why it matters: The WSJ is one of several legacy media companies experimenting with Substack as a way to expand its reach, including the Washington Post, The Economist, Financial Times and The New Yorker.
🔬 Micro (Tech Companies)
Oracle struck about $150 billion worth of lease commitments on data centers in the three months ending November, it revealed in securities filing late last week, a sign it is preparing for the cloud deals that customers such as OpenAI have struck with Oracle.
Oracle has delayed the completion of some of the data centers it is developing for OpenAI to 2028 from 2027.
Snapchat rolls out its end-of-year Recaps. The Recap is a short video that offers a personalized look at highlights from Snaps, Stories, and Chats, showing how users connected and expressed themselves throughout the year
PayPal Holdings applied to set up a Utah-based bank, a move that would allow it to directly provide loans to customers instead of relying on third-party banks for much of the process.
DoorDash rolled out Zesty, an AI social app for discovering new restaurants. Users can view and share photos and comments about restaurants they’ve visited, discover content from others, and follow people just like on any social network.
X’s revenue jumped 17% to $752 million during the third quarter, though the site is still bringing in significantly less cash than when Musk acquired it.
Micron’s, a memory chip-maker, shares climbed 8% after it reported 57% growth in revenue of $13.64 billion for its first fiscal quarter, ended Nov. 27, well above its September projection that it would bring in as much as $12.8 billion in revenue.
Coinbase is launching stock trading, prediction markets, stablecoin issuance, and other new features in payments and wealth advisory, in its bid to become an “everything exchange.”
Google’s ‘dark web report’ feature will no longer be available starting in February. This tool aimed to help users monitor their personal information on the dark web.
Pornhub suffered a hack when a hacking group stole premium users’ data, including email addresses and viewing history.
The Oscars (frontrunners announced here) will move from ABC to YouTube beginning in 2029. Why it matters: What’s arguably the most high-profile award show is leaving ABC for the first time in more than 50 years, showing the influence of streaming. 📺 Plus: it’s where all the eyes are - YouTube users streamed more than 700 million hours of podcasts on their TVs and other living room devices in October, up 75% YOY.
Roomba maker iRobot filed for bankruptcy.
🤖 AI News
Merriam-Webster’s 2025 word of the year: “slop”, which captures the “tsunami of low-quality content inundating online life and corroding reality”.
But will there be another Steve Carrell show about it? The White House unveiled a new AI-focused “Tech Force” yesterday to tap employees from the nation’s biggest tech firms to modernize the federal government
🥭Meta is developing a new AI image and video model code-named ‘Mango’.
Google is integrating its vibe-coding tool Opal into Gemini, allowing users to create their own custom apps.
Manus, an artificial intelligence agent that briefly went viral earlier this year and got financial backing from Benchmark, said that its annual run rate has just reached $125 million, up from $90 million in August.
🤝 Select M&A, Fundraises, IPO, Partnerships
M&A
⭐️TikTok has signed a deal to divest its U.S. entity to a joint venture controlled by American investors. Why it matters: A deal would end a yearslong saga to force TikTok’s Chinese parent ByteDance to sell the company’s U.S. operation to domestic owners to alleviate national security concerns.
Warner Bros. Discovery’s board rejected Paramount’s hostile bid, sticking with a deal it has already reached with Netflix, citing “significant risks” of the Paramount offer.
Coursera and Udemy enter a merger agreement valued at around $2.5B, bringing together two of the biggest names in online learning. Coursera will acquire Udemy in a $950m all-stock transaction.
ServiceNow is in advanced talks to buy cybersecurity firm Armis in a deal worth around $7 billion.
Salesforce has struck an agreement to acquire Qualified, a seven-year-old startup that helps Salesforce customers generate sales leads from their websites.
Pinterest is buying tvScientific, a CTV ad buying platform, to expand its reach into living rooms.
Fundraising
⭐️Amazon is in talks to invest $10 billion or more in OpenAI at a valuation exceeding $500 billion
Lovable raised $330M at a $6.6B valuation. Lovable has seen its valuation more than triple just five months after the company’s last funding round in July
Databricks raised $4B in a Series L funding round at a $134B valuation, up from the $100bn valuation it reached just 3mos ago.
Waymo is in early talks with potential investors to raise more money at a valuation of at least $100 billion
Partnerships
Disney’s OpenAI deal is exclusive for just one year -- then it’s open season: After the one year is up, Disney is free to sign similar deals with other AI companies.
⚱️ Gold Panning - For those who reached the bottom
🔥Ancient humans may have learned to make fire around 350,000 years earlier than we previously believed, scientists report in a new Nature study.
🎋What’s in, what’s out for interior design: hello to bamboo details, vintage glam, and… cork chic and tin kitchens? sometimes i feel like these articles troll us common folk.
🏒Trending - hockey romance? Move over romantasy. The book market is flooded with steamy novels about love on the ice, including titles like “Puck and Prejudice.” The phenomenon has sparked curiosity and confusion in the literary world and beyond.
🦸♀️Warner Brothers’ Supergirl trailer took over Tiktok this past weekend - the trailer was the first video to every user across 13 territories including the U.S., UK, and South Korea. TikTok is the only place Gen Z reliably encounters marketing at scale, so rather than hoping for organic buzz, Warner Bros. made engagement mandatory.
🏆Oscar frontrunners revealed - and they include ‘Sinners’, ‘Wicked 2’ and ‘Frankenstein’.
💖As a Connecticutian this makes me so proud: Fans of made-for-TV Christmas movies are flocking to Connecticut — now the unofficial backlot of Hallmark-style romances. Connecticut — the location for at least 22 holiday films by Hallmark, Lifetime and others — is leaning in with a “Christmas Movie Trail” that launched last year. Hopefully this inspires you to watch some cute Christmas movies next week! 🎄
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