This Week in Tech (Week Ending Dec 5, 2025)
TL;DR - 🤖 A lot of AI news, like more than usual
Hey folks!
Happy Friday and Happy December! Tech news below!
TL;DR -
M&A activity from both OpenAI (Neptune, a startup that makes tools for monitoring and analyzing progress during AI model training) and Anthropic (Bun, a startup that makes JS code run faster).
Kalshi raised $1 billion in a fundraising round, and struck a partnership with CNN to put its data in CNN journalism.
Anthropic inked a $200 million deal with Snowflake to bring its AI models to Snowflake’s 12,600 customers.
🎥This past weekend, records were made when a movie became the highest global animated box office opening of all time. See below for what it was.
🌎 Macro (Economic) and Trends
🛍️U.S. shoppers are expected to spend between $11.7 billion and $11.9 billion on Black Friday purchases. That figure is expected to be the highest yet for Black Friday spending and a more than 9% increase from a year earlier. Shopify said its merchants generated $14.6 billion in worldwide sales during the Black Friday and Cyber Monday holiday shopping weekend, a 27% increase from last year.
Bitcoin is down nearly 32% from its all-time high of $126,080 in October.
🙅🇫🇷French President Emmanuel Macron last week endorsed the idea of cellphone bans in high schools, becoming the latest world leader to back restrictions on teen tech and social media use after Australia was the first country to ban children under 16 from popular apps such as TikTok and Instagram.
🇭🇳President Trump pardoned the former president of Honduras this week, Juan Orlando Hernández, and he was released from federal prison. Hernández had been sentenced to 45 years in prison for flooding the U.S. with cocaine.
Politicians, they’re just like us: Russ Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, doodled during this week’s Cabinet meeting, which lasted more than two hours. He drew mountains framed by pine trees and topped by fluffy clouds.
Trending - baby news: Move over cat videos - the latest clips to go viral are videos of politicians as babies reporting on real news. Diaper Diplomacy, a collection of social-media channels that use artificial intelligence to turn all the adults in clips of real news events into toddlers.
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🔬 Micro (Tech Companies)
Apple plans to use Intel to manufacture low-end chips for its laptops and iPads.
📣Earnings:
Salesforce reported 9% higher revenue in its fiscal third quarter ended Oct. 31, a marginal slowdown on its second quarter result, but the company raised its full year growth projection marginally. Its results also show that its flagship AI product, Agentforce, is growing rapidly but at a slightly slower rate than a quarter earlier.
Snowflake said its revenue rose 29% to $1.21 billion in the quarter that ended Oct. 31, beating its growth forecast for the quarter by 3 percentage points.
NBC News is launching its first-ever, direct-to-consumer digital subscription product. The company’s target consumer is “between the coasts,” Berend says, which means NBC News isn’t trying to compete with news brands such as the New York Times, Politico or Wall Street Journal.
Uber and Avride launch robotaxi service in Dallas: The robotaxis will initially have a human safety operator behind the wheel who will monitor the ride.
Sam Altman reportedly explores building a competitor to Elon Musk’s SpaceX. The OpenAI C.E.O. held talks about raising funds to buy or partner with a rocket company.
Amazon has started testing a new ultrafast delivery service aimed at getting groceries and other staple items to shoppers in as little as 30 minutes. The service is now live in Seattle and Philadelphia. Once again, this Ronny Chieng clip rings true 5 yrs later:
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Layoffs: Omnicom will lay off about 4,000 employees, and an additional 10,000 people will be impacted by sell-offs, following the completion of its acquisition of rival Interpublic Group.
🤖 AI News
Amazon’s AI chatbot Rufus drove sales on Black Friday. Amazon sessions that resulted in a sale were up 100% in the U.S. when the AI chatbot Rufus was used. They only increased by 20% when Rufus wasn’t used.
OpenAI is feeling increased pressure from three major threats: Wall Street, chatbot users and Google:
1. Money. OpenAI has long underestimated how many people would use ChatGPT and how much that usage would cost. Its original Microsoft deal helped cover those costs. Now that the partnership has been restructured, OpenAI will have to generate far more revenue on its own.
2. Safety. Altman has repeatedly expressed surprise that people would use ChatGPT as a therapist, confidant and romantic partner.
3. Gemini. The real threat is Google’s Gemini, which has the money, data and chips to compete with OpenAI on an entirely different level. (more here)
The U.S. Department of Defense has delayed releasing a secure website where its employees can access chatbots and discuss unclassified matters. When the site launches, it will likely include Google’s Gemini chatbot,
Mistral unveiled its Mistral 3 lineup, including a frontier model and efficient small models designed for offline, customizable enterprise use—aiming to prove small, fine-tuned AI can beat closed-source giants.
Apple just named a new AI chief as John Giannandrea steps down. His replacement is Amar Subramanya, a highly regarded Microsoft executive who spent 16 years at Google, most recently leading engineering for the Gemini Assistant.
Nvidia bought $2 billion worth of stock in Synopsys, a semiconductor company.
Morgan Stanley is said to weigh cutting its exposure to data center loans. The bank has held talks with investors about using Synthetic Risk Transfer transactions to lower its exposure to loans made to finance data centers powering the A.I. boom.
David Sacks, President Trump’s AI and crypto czar, was featured in a NYT report this past weekend for potentially having a conflict between his White House role and his personal investments. However, Sacks fired back, calling the story a “nothing burger.”
🤝 Select M&A, Fundraises, IPO, Partnerships
M&A
⭐️OpenAI has agreed to buy Neptune, a startup that makes tools for monitoring and analyzing progress during AI model training.
⭐️Anthropic has acquired Bun. Bun makes JS code run faster, and the company is filled with the best JS devs.
ServiceNow, an IT, HR and finance software provider, acquired security startup Veza for more than $1 billion. Veza is at least ServiceNow’s sixth acquisition this year, including its $2.85 billion agreement to buy Moveworks, a startup that automates IT help desk responses.
Marvell Technology is acquiring Celestial AI for $3.25 billion in a cash-and-stock combination. A deal with Celestial could help Marvell build out its data center offerings
Bending Spoons, an Italian tech conglomerate, is acquiring ticketing firm Eventbrite for about $500 million in cash.
👠 Prada closed its nearly $1.4 billion purchase of fashion rival Versace, a “highly anticipated deal ... expected to relaunch Versace’s fortunes, after middling post-pandemic performance”.
Fundraising
🦄At least 80 new tech unicorns were minted in 2025 so far.
Kalshi raised $1 billion in a fundraising round led by existing investor Paradigm at a $11 billion valuation, more than double its $5 billion valuation in October.
Black Forest Labs, a German AI lab, raised $300M at $3.25B valuation.
Databricks is reportedly in talks to raise $5 billion at a valuation of $134 billion, which is about 32 times this year’s expected sales of around $4.1 billion.
Strategy, the largest bitcoin-holding stock, said it established a $1.4 billion dollar reserve by selling shares to pay dividends and interest
Partnerships
Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud launched a new jointly developed service that enables their customers to instantly establish high-speed connectivity between the two cloud platforms. Such a service would, for example, make it easier for customers using both cloud providers to move data between the two platforms while training or operating AI models.
Anthropic inked a $200 million deal with Snowflake to bring its AI models to Snowflake’s 12,600 customers.
OpenAI is expected to announce that it is taking an ownership stake in Thrive Holdings, and that it will embed employees at the company’s two main businesses, the accounting firm Crete Professionals Alliance and the I.T. services provider Shield Technology Partners. The idea is to supercharge how they adopt A.I., including by helping create customized models for Crete and Shield.
CNN has stuck a partnership with Kalshi, the world’s largest global prediction market company, bringing Kalshi’s data to its journalism across its television, digital and social channels.
⚱️ Gold Panning - For those who reached the bottom
📚Looking for holiday gifts? here’s the NYT book gift guide
☁️Feels like a grift: Pantone just announced the color for 2026 is…. white. Or Cloud Dancer in their parlance. Pantone says the shade is “a symbol of calming influence in a frenetic society” and “a blank canvas” on which we can all start again
🎥Disney’s “Zootopia 2” brought in roughly half a billion dollars over the weekend, making it the highest global animated box office opening of all time and the biggest global debut of the year.
Reneé Rapp is the new face of Abercrombie
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Excellent weekly roundup! Marvell's $3.25B acquisition of Celestial AI is particularly noteworthy. The photonics play signals they're serious about next-gen datacenter interconnects, especially as bandwidth demands from AI workloads keep pushing conventional electronics to their limits. Optical computing at the chip level isnt justa marginal improvement, it could fundamentally shift how we approach distributed training clusters. This positions Marvell well to compete beyond traditional silicon offerings inthe hyperscaler space.