Stockholm-based vibe coding startup Lovable raised $330M led by CapitalG and Menlo Ventures at a $6.6B valuation, up from $1.8B after raising $200M in July (Niko Gallogly/New York Times)
Documents: OpenAI has sold 700K+ ChatGPT licenses to ~35 US public universities for students and faculty, who used it 14M+ times in September, beating Copilot (Bloomberg)
Study: AI's 2025 power demand could hit 23GW, above 2024 Bitcoin mining levels, and AI carbon emissions could hit 32.6M to 79.7M tons, compared to NYC's 50M (Justine Calma/The Verge)
TMTG agrees to merge with Google-backed fusion energy company TAE in a $6B deal and begin building the "world's first utility-scale fusion power plant" in 2026 (Financial Times)
UK AI Security Institute report: AI models are rapidly improving at potentially dangerous biological and chemical tasks, and show fast jumps in self-replication (Shakeel Hashim/Transformer)
Apple says it will roll out more App Store ads in 2026 "to increase opportunity in search results"; Apple's website says 800M+ users visit the App Store weekly (Chance Miller/9to5Mac)
Amazon CSO Stephen Schmidt says subtle keystroke data lag, measuring 110ms instead of the expected tens of milliseconds, helped catch a North Korean IT worker (Jake Bleiberg/Bloomberg)
Circana: Xbox Series console sales fell 70% YoY to an all-time low in November, compared to the PS5's 40% YoY drop and Switch 1 and 2's combined 10% YoY fall (Rebekah Valentine/IGN) https://www.ign.com/articles/xbox-us-console-unit-sales-just-reached-an-all-time-november-low
Honda plans to halt production in Japan and China from December 29 to January 6, showing the ongoing fallout of the global chip shortage and Nexperia takeover (Bloomberg) https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-18/chip-shortage-lingers-as-honda-to-halt-output-in-japan-china
Sources: Yann LeCun is in early talks to raise €500M for his startup at a ~€3B valuation, and plans to name Alexandre LeBrun as CEO, ahead of a January launch (Financial Times)