This Week in Tech (Week Ending Jan 30, 2026)
TL;DR - 📉 Economic confidence; 🚙 Autonomous Vehicles; 💰 OpenAI
Hey folks!
Happy Friday 😎 Tech news below:
TL;DR -
📉 Americans’ economic confidence plunged to its lowest level in 12 years.
🚙 Quite a bit of news in the autonomous vehicle industry: Uber launches an ‘AV Labs’ division to gather driving data for robotaxi partners. Waabi, an AV startup, raised $1B and expanded into robotaxis with Uber. Plus, the National Transportation Safety Board said it planned to open a safety investigation into the activity of Waymo vehicles following reports that Waymo vehicles had illegally passed school district buses that had stopped to load or unload students at least 19 times.
💰 OpenAI’s just scooping up $$$: SoftBank is in talks to invest up to $30 billion in OpenAI, and Amazon.com is in talks to invest up to $50 billion in OpenAI. Plus, OpenAI is laying the groundwork for a public listing in Q4.
🌎 Macro (Economic) and Trends
Markets
📈 The S&P 500 on Wednesday crossed the 7,000 mark for the first time, as investors shrugged off tariff and Fed worries.
Investors around the world are losing faith in traditional safe havens like the dollar and Treasuries, fueling a fierce rally in gold, which on Monday hit $5,000 an ounce for the first time.
The U.S. population grew just 0.5% from July 2024 to July 2025, adding 1.8 million people. That’s the slowest rate since the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the population grew by an anemic 0.2%.
Americans’ economic confidence plunged to its lowest level in 12 years amid consumer angst over prices and pessimism about the job market.
🔬 Micro (Tech Companies)
📣 Earnings
Tesla profit tanked 46% in 2025. Sales fell for a second year in a row, as Tesla looks to AI and robotics, including a new $2 billion investment in CEO Elon Musk’s company xAI.
Microsoft revenue grew 17% to $81.3 billion in the fourth quarter of 2025, a slightly lower rate of year-over-year growth than in the previous quarter. Revenue from Azure and other cloud services grew 39% in the fourth quarter, compared to 40% growth in the quarter prior.
Meta Platforms reported fourth-quarter revenue of $59.8 billion, up 24% from a year earlier, exceeding its own forecasts of $56 billion to $59 billion. The company also outlined ambitious spending plans for 2026, forecasting capital expenditures of $115 billion to $135 billion, up roughly 73% from $72 billion in 2025.
ServiceNow shares dipped 7% in after-hours trading after its fourth-quarter earnings, possibly because investors weren’t impressed by the enterprise software provider’s revenue growth forecast for its current fiscal year, which would be the same as its recently concluded one.
⚖️ Lawsuits and criminal investigations:
The Justice Department has launched a criminal investigation into allegations payroll startup Deel recruited and paid a spy inside a Rippling office in Ireland.
YouTubers sue Snap for alleged copyright infringement in training its AI models. The YouTubers claim Snap, like others, used AI datasets meant for research and academic use to train its AI models.
Google paid $68M to settle claims its voice assistant spied on users. Google did not admit wrongdoing in the settlement of the class-action case.
TikTok settled a lawsuit brought against several social media firms by a 20-year-old girl from Chico, Calif., who claims her social media addiction led to depression and suicidal thoughts. It is the first in a series of cases to go to trial, testing whether social media companies can be held liable for harming youth mental health through addictive product design.
🤖🚙 Autonomous vehicles
Uber launches an ‘AV Labs’ division to gather driving data for robotaxi partners. Uber is not developing its own robotaxis again; instead it plans to collect and offer data. It’s a bet that more volume will help autonomous vehicle partners solve the weirdest edge cases.
Waabi, an AV startup, raised $1B and expanded into robotaxis with Uber. Waabi has secured a $750 million Series C round to accelerate autonomous trucking, and another roughly $250 million commitment from Uber to deploy 25,000 robotaxis exclusively on its platform.
Waymos are getting cheaper (relatively): Riding in a Waymo is now, on average, 12.7% more expensive than riding in an Uber and 27.4% more expensive than riding in a Lyft, down from a 30% to 40% premium for Waymo rides last April. The convergence in pricing partly stems from Uber and Lyft having raised their average prices. 😑
The National Transportation Safety Board said it planned to open a safety investigation into the activity of Waymo vehicles around school buses in Austin, Texas.. The investigation follows a report that Waymo vehicles had illegally passed school district buses that had stopped to load or unload students at least 19 times. ‼️ Plus, Waymo says one of its robotaxis struck a child near a school in Santa Monica, and federal safety officials are investigating.
Tesla has agreed to invest $2 billion in xAI, further deepening ties between the two Elon Musk-led companies.
Spotify is rolling out group chats.
👻 Snap is getting serious about Specs; it’s spinning the AR glasses division into a standalone company.
🛒Amazon is closing its physical Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh stores. Upon closing down some stores in 2024, an Amazon spokesperson said that the company “couldn’t make the economics work with the lease cost.”
✂️Layoffs: Amazon is cutting 16,000 jobs, adding to the thousands of cuts it made in October. Autodesk, the SF-based maker of design and engineering software, is laying off 1,000 employees. Pinterest to lay off 15% of staff to redirect resources to AI. Home Depot laid off 800 workers to increase “speed and agility” — 150 at headquarters in Atlanta, and the rest working remotely.
🤖 AI News
OpenAI is getting ready to unveil a new offering that aims to help large business customers incorporate AI into a variety of operations, from customer service to rewriting older application code. The new product is part of the ChatGPT maker’s broader push to get customers to sign multi-year contracts worth more than $100 million.
🙋🏻♀️👁️OpenAI is planning to use eyeball-scanning orbs or Apple’s Face ID to make sure the users of its planned social media app are humans, not computers. The orb is an iris scanner produced by Tools for Humanity, a company co-founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wrote a 38pg essay warning of “real danger” that superhuman intelligence will cause civilization-level damage absent smart, speedy intervention.
Anthropic launched interactive Claude apps, including Slack and other workplace tools. Anthropic also increased its 2026 revenue forecast by 20% to $18bn.
👀 Inside Anthropic’s ‘destructive’ consumption of physical books to feed more knowledge into the AI models behind products such as its popular chatbot, Claude.
Nvidia invested another $2 billion into AI cloud startup CoreWeave as part of a broader deal in which CoreWeave committed to adopt “multiple generations” of Nvidia chips including the upcoming Rubin GPUs.
🤝 Select M&A, Fundraises, IPO, Partnerships
M&A
Elon Musk’s SpaceX and xAI are in talks to merge. This merger would bring the Grok chatbot, Starlink satellites, and SpaceX rockets together under one corporation.
Google has acquired Common Sense Machines, a startup developing generative artificial intelligence models to create three-dimensional assets from two-dimensional images.
Apple bought Israeli startup Q.ai. Q.ai is an Israeli startup specializing in imaging and machine learning, particularly technologies that enable devices to interpret whispered speech and enhance audio in noisy environments
🚂 Union Pacific’s ambitious plan to merge with Norfolk Southern in a $72 billion deal — creating a powerful new transcontinental freight rail network — hit a snag this month when a federal regulator said the companies’ application was incomplete and demanded that it be refiled.
Fundraising
SoftBank is in talks to invest up to $30 billion in OpenAI, and Amazon.com is in talks to invest up to $50 billion in OpenAI.
Google invested in Sakana AI, a Tokyo-based developer of AI models and applications. Sakana, Japan’s most highly valued AI startup, also announced a strategic partnership with Google that will allow it to use the U.S. tech giant’s state-of-the-art AI models to build its technologies and products.
Synthesia, whose AI platform helps companies create interactive training videos, has raised a $200 million Series E round of funding that brings its valuation to $4 billion — up from $2.1 billion just a year ago.
IPO
⭐️OpenAI is laying the groundwork for a public listing in the fourth quarter of this year, accelerating its plans as competition with rival Anthropic intensifies.
🚀 SpaceX is said to be weighing an I.P.O. at a roughly $1.5 trillion valuation in June — to coincide with a planetary alignment of Jupiter and Venus and with Elon Musk’s birthday.🤣
Fervo Energy, a startup developing geothermal power projects, filed confidential paperwork for an initial public offering.
⚱️ Gold Panning - For those who reached the bottom
💉 Peptides: Young people are buying unregulated peptides directly from Chinese manufacturers via Instagram and WhatsApp. Gray-market peptides have flooded Silicon Valley, particularly among young tech bros, with U.S. customs data showing imports of hormone and peptide compounds from China roughly doubled to $328 million in the first three quarters of 2025, from $164 million in the same period of 2024.
👟 RIP Allbirds - the shoe company is closing nearly all locations. But also, yay better fashion!
🕺🏻 Khaby Lame, the world’s biggest TikToker with 160 million followers, signed a $975 million deal with Nasdaq-listed Rich Sparkle Holdings Ltd. for 36 months of exclusive global rights to his brand.
Alex Honnold, famous for “Free Solo,” takes a selfie atop Taipei 101 in Taiwan after free soloing the 11th-tallest skyscraper (1,667 feet) in the world.
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