This Week in Tech (Week Ending Jan 9, 2026)

TL;DR - 🇻🇪 Venezuela; 🤖AI fundraises; 🤑 Strong year for IPOs expected;

Hey folks!

Happy new year! CES was this past week. Quite a few 2025 data roundups reporting on trends. Tech news below:

TL;DR -

• 🇻🇪 Trump announced that the US has captured Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro.

• 🤖AI fundraises: XAI, Elon Musk’s AI lab, said it had raised $20 billion, and Anthropic, the developer of the chatbot Claude, plans to raise $10 billion at a valuation of $350 billion before the new investment.

• 🤑 Wall Street expects 2026 to be a strong year for I.P.O.s. Proof - Discord, the popular chat platform, has reportedly filed confidentially to go public.

• 🤡Plus: the first meme of 2026 just dropped

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🌎 Macro (Economic) and Trends

• The Dow Jones Industrial Average hit a record high Tuesday as the blue-chip stock index edges toward a psychologically important threshold of 50,000 but declined as the week progressed.

• 🇻🇪 Major news w Venezuela: This past Saturday, Trump announced that the US has captured Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. The capture of Maduro was part of a military operation that included “large-scale strikes” on Venezuela. For more context check out Vox’s Explained. Maduro’s capture appears to have emboldened Trump to potentially pursue other countries, like claiming Greenland needing to come under American control. Trump even updated the “Monroe Doctrine” (the 1823 foundational statement of U.S. claims over the Western Hemisphere) to the “Donroe doctrine”.

• 🇮🇷Iran’s internet has collapsed amid protests over its economic crisis.

• 🥩 The Trump administration released new dietary guidelines that flip the food pyramid on its head, putting steak, cheese and whole milk near the top.

• 😷 This flu season is shaping up as one of the most severe in recent memory — and it could get even worse. At least 11 million people have gotten sick, 120,000 have been hospitalized and 5,000 have died from the flu so far this season,

• Media trend: Major live TV events saw a notable ratings uptick in 2025, underscoring how much audiences are craving communal, real-time experiences as their day-to-day viewing habits become more fragmented.

  

• Media trend: MAGA media appears to splintering and/or encountering stagnating growth. The MAGA media universe is made up of many smaller outlets and individuals that — with the exception of Fox News — don’t have the same resources to invest in new technology and growth strategies.

• 👯 Confirmed: they’re friends again

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🔬 Micro (Tech Companies)

• 📈Google’s parent Alphabet on Wednesday passed Apple in market capitalization to become the second most valuable company in the world, worth $3.885 trillion, compared to Apple’s value of $3.846 trillion. Nvidia, worth $4.595 trillion, is far and away the most valuable firm.

• 🚙Tesla delivered 16% fewer vehicles in the fourth quarter of 2025 than it did during the same period during the previous year, a worse-than-expected finish to the company’s second full year of falling sales.

• Nvidia launched the company’s new Rubin computing architecture at CES, as well as AI models for autonomous vehicles (Alpamayo 1).

• Intel shares jumped 10% on Thursday after executives shared at CES that the chipmaker is developing a bespoke gaming chip and software for mobile gaming devices

• 🛍️Amazon has sparked blowback from some small retailers over a feature that displays items not sold on its site in Amazon search results. Amazon launched the feature, called “Shop Other Stores Directly” or “Buy for me”, in April, but has been ramping up how many products are listed through the feature recently. When shoppers search for branded items on Amazon’s site, Amazon will show shoppers items sold on its own site, as well as products only available on outside sites.

• 📌Pinterest has repositioned the platform away from addictive algorithms toward “AI for positivity,” prioritizing content users save rather than just view. The strategy has paid off: Gen Z now represents over half of Pinterest’s 600 million monthly active users, and 85% of Gen Zs say they’re likely to use Pinterest to find products. The turnaround has reportedly caught OpenAI’s attention, with The Information suggesting the company may consider acquiring Pinterest to access its human-generated product search data and help build ChatGPT as a shopping tool, speculation that sent Pinterest’s stocks up 3%

• 🎶 I love lurking: Spotify is introducing a new Messages feature that will let users see what their friends are streaming in real time and send requests to start Jams, the app’s collaborative listening feature.

• 🤖🧱Lego debuted Smart Bricks at CES; Smart Bricks is billed as Lego’s biggest innovation since the first minifigure in 1978. How it works: The new bricks contain sensors that enable them to sense light and distance, and to provide an array of responses, essentially lights and sounds

• 🛍️Saks Global appears to be on the verge of filing for bankruptcy. Last month, the retail giant skipped its interest payment of more than $100 million to bondholders.

🤖 AI News

• 📉Trend - Traffic to top websites has fallen by more than 11% in the past five years, — a clear sign of the challenges traditional publishers face in the AI era.

• Character.AI and Google have reached agreements to settle multiple lawsuits brought by families who alleged that Character’s chatbots contributed to their children killing or harming themselves.

• Gmail debuted a personalized AI Inbox and AI Overviews in search.

• 💪ChatGPT is getting a dedicated health tab. The new feature, ChatGPT Health, allows users to bring in data from other apps and sources for AI analysis.

• Amazon is bringing Alexa+ to the web with a new Alexa.com site, expanding its AI assistant beyond devices and positioning it as a family-focused, agent-style chatbot

• Sovereign AI: One of the major trends in the AI industry in the past year was the movement by various countries to develop their own domestic AI capabilities to reduce their technological dependence on the U.S. and China. Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populous country behind India, China and the U.S., is among the most active.

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🤝 Select M&A, Fundraises, IPO, Partnerships

M&A

• The Chinese government is reviewing Meta Platforms’ $2 billion acquisition of AI startup Manus for potential violations of technology export control.

• ✋Warner Bros. Discovery rejected Paramount’s revised $108.4bn bid, calling it a ‘leveraged buyout’ that would saddle the company with $87 billion in debt.

• OpenAI is acquiring the team behind executive coaching AI tool Convogo in an all-stock deal.

• ❄️Snowflake announced its intent to buy observability platform Observe. Snowflake is bolstering its data stack to make the platform better suited to the sheer volume of data produced by AI agents.

Fundraising

• XAI, Elon Musk’s AI lab, said it had raised $20 billion from investors. That’s more money than the initial $15 billion the company had targeted, at a $230 billion valuation.

• ⭐️Anthropic, the developer of the chatbot Claude, plans to raise $10 billion at a valuation of $350 billion before the new investment.

• Swap, a Shopify competitor, raises $100M six months after raising $40M.

Partnerships

• JPMorgan Chase has reached a deal to take over the Apple credit-card program from Goldman Sachs.

IPO

• Discord, the popular chat platform, has reportedly filed confidentially to go public.

• Crunchbase predicts 15 IPOs in 2026 including Cohere, Canva, SpaceX and more. Wall Street expects 2026 to be a strong year for I.P.O.s.

⚱️ Gold Panning - For those who reached the bottom

• 🎥 The 2025 North American box office fell short of the $9 billion analysts projected heading into the year, thanks to underperforming sequels and superhero movies that led to an especially weak summer and fall season. Why it matters: Domestic entertainment tends to do well amid inflation and economic uncertainty, as people pull back from pricier international travel. But while concerts and theme parks boomed in the U.S. last year, theaters struggled.

• ‼️Pizza is falling out of favor: Pizzerias are now outnumbered by coffee shops and Mexican food eateries.

• 🙂‍↔️Introducing - the first meme of 2026 apparently: not explaining yourself. Background: A Tiktok user declared she was going to mark 2026 using 365 buttons. How? Nobody’s sure and Tamara isn’t taking any questions. Tamara’s unwillingness to explain further quickly spiraled into a viral trend - including responses from the Philadelphia Eagles and the Empire State Building accounts.

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