Walmart and Google are launching a new shopping experience inside Gemini, combining Google’s AI with Walmart and Sam’s Club’s vast assortment, fast delivery, and personalized commerce powered by the Universal Commerce Protocol.
Google introduced the Universal Commerce Protocol, an open standard for agentic commerce, enabling AI-driven shopping, checkout, and branded agent interactions across retailers and platforms.
Chinese AI startup DeepSeek is set to release its next-generation V4 model in mid-February, featuring enhanced coding capabilities and support for long-form programming tasks.
China-based AI startup MiniMax raised $620 million in its Hong Kong IPO, with shares doubling on the first day. The company develops large language models and AI applications for global users.
Meta signed 20-year agreements to purchase nuclear power from three Vistra plants and develop small modular reactors with Oklo and TerraPower, aiming to meet growing AI-related electricity demand.
Elon Musk’s AI startup xAI posted a $1.46 billion net loss for Q3 2025, up from $1 billion in the prior quarter, while revenue nearly doubled to $107 million.
Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) raised over $15 billion across five new funds, including $1.7 billion for AI infrastructure and $6.75 billion for scaling startups, amid surging investor interest in tech.
X restricted Grok’s AI image-generation feature to paying subscribers following global criticism over non-consensual sexualized images of women and children. The move does not affect the standalone Grok app.
Anthropic has partnered with Allianz to deploy its Claude AI models and custom agents across the insurer, emphasizing responsible, transparent AI for multi-step workflows and regulatory compliance.
OpenAI has acqui-hired the team behind Convogo, a leadership assessment platform, to support its AI cloud efforts. The startup’s technology will not be acquired and will be shut down.
Sakana AI’s ALE-Agent secured 1st place in the AtCoder Heuristic Contest 058, outperforming 804 human participants. The agent autonomously discovered novel optimization strategies during the 4-hour competition.
Nvidia is requiring Chinese customers to pay in full upfront for its H200 AI chips amid regulatory uncertainty. The move reflects rising political and export risks tied to advanced semiconductor sales.
PayPal and Microsoft are integrating checkout and payments directly into Copilot, allowing users to discover products and complete purchases without leaving the AI interface. The rollout begins on Copilot.com and expands PayPal’s agentic commerce strategy.
Snowflake agreed to acquire observability platform Observe to strengthen telemetry monitoring and AI-scale data operations. The deal would mark Snowflake’s largest acquisition to date.
Google is rolling out Gemini-powered features in Gmail to help users summarize emails, generate replies, and prioritize messages. The updates aim to improve productivity as email volumes continue to rise.