This Week in Tech (Week Ending Feb 3, 2026)
Short but packed week!
Hey folks!
Happy Tuesday! I’ll be traveling tmrw through the end of the week (forgot Superbowl Sunday was happening hah 🤪) and was going to skip this week but enough happened in the past 48 hours it felt appropriate to do a quick highlights email before I left. See you next Friday!
🌎 Macro (Economic) and Trends
📉 Investors’ fears that new developments in artificial intelligence will supplant software reverberated through the stock market, dragging down the shares of companies that develop, license and even invest in code and systems.
The Nasdaq fell 1.4% after investors homed in on Anthropic’s announcement that it was adding new legal tools to its Cowork assistant meant to help automate a number of legal drafting and research tasks.
Millions of new pages of Jeffrey Epstein files were released by the Justice Department on Friday. The Epstein case has become shorthand for a deeper belief that powerful figures operate by different rules, and that the system is either unwilling or unable to hold them fully to account.
🔬 Micro (Tech Companies)
👑 Disney named parks chief Josh D’Amaro as CEO. He will be the ninth person to lead the company in its 102-year history. In its earnings, 📣 Walt Disney Co. reported a sharp drop in profits from its entertainment segment for the December quarter, as lower profits from its TV networks offset better results from its streaming business. Profits from Disney’s sports segment, which includes ESPN, also fell.
⭐️ SpaceX acquired xAI. Why it matters: Musk — by uniting his space and AI companies — is betting his empire on orbital data centers powered by the sun. The combined SpaceX-xAI company is valued at around $1.2 trillion. (more) It could be the biggest merger in history ** (it’s privately valued so it’s tbd). There’s also a long-term antitrust question: If data centers in space become a reality — if and Musk has a near-monopoly on them — would other A.I. model makers be able to use them?
Waymo said Monday it has raised $16 billion at a $126 billion valuation.
📉Shares in Nvidia, the chipmaker at the heart of the A.I. boom, fell nearly 3 percent Monday on reported tensions between the company and OpenAI, one of its biggest customers. The Wall Street Journal had reported, citing unnamed sources, that a $100 billion pledge by Nvidia to invest in OpenAI had stalled amid concerns about OpenAI’s business strategy.
❄️Snowflake has inked a $200 million, multi-year agreement with OpenAI, under which it will incorporate the startup’s AI models in its own application-building service and equip its employees with OpenAI’s business version of ChatGPT.
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