📋 Quick Takeaways

• China approves Nvidia H200 chip sales to ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent for 400,000+ units, marking major shift in US-China tech relations
• SoftBank in talks to invest $30 billion more in OpenAI, potentially pushing valuation to $830 billion
• ASML reports record Q4 orders of $15.8 billion, more than doubling analyst expectations amid AI chip demand surge
• Amazon announces 16,000 layoffs, the largest workforce reduction in company history combined with October cuts
• Waabi raises $1 billion and partners with Uber to deploy 25,000 robotaxis
• $700M+ in major AI startup funding across autonomous vehicles, enterprise AI, and cloud infrastructure

🌏 Geopolitics & Semiconductor Trade

China Approves Nvidia H200 Chip Sales to ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent

Major Breakthrough: China granted approval for its three largest tech companies to purchase more than 400,000 Nvidia H200 AI chips, marking a significant shift in Beijing’s approach to balancing AI advancement against domestic chip industry development.

📋 Quick Takeaways

• $410M+ in major AI funding including Inferact ($150M seed at $800M valuation) and Neurophos ($110M Series A for photonic chips)
• Elon Musk at Davos 2026 predicts AI smarter than any human by end of 2026, warns electrical power is limiting US AI deployment
• OpenAI introduces ads to ChatGPT, surprising Google DeepMind CEO who says Google is thinking through monetization “very carefully”
• Apple reportedly training next-gen Siri on Google Cloud TPUs, signaling major shift in Big Tech compute partnerships
• Anthropic CEO criticizes H200 chip sales to China, comparing decision to “selling nuclear weapons to North Korea”
• Jensen Huang declares AI creates trade jobs rather than destroying employment, with plumber/electrician salaries nearly doubling

🚀 Major AI Funding & Infrastructure Investment

Inferact Raises $150M Seed at $800M Valuation for AI Inference Platform

Breakthrough Funding: The commercial startup behind open-source vLLM secured $150 million in seed funding on January 22, 2026, co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed Venture Partners.