📼 Higgsfield hits $200M run rate as generative video turns into infrastructure

🖱 The generative video startup closed an $80M Series A extension, bringing total funding to $130M and valuation above $1.3B. The company reports a $200M annual run rate less than 9 months after launch.

🖱 Higgsfield says it now generates about 4.5M videos per day and has over 15M users. Around 85% of usage comes from social media marketers, with most output tied to paid commercial work.

🖱 Customers are using it as an end to end production system, from concept to publishing. Video is being treated less like a campaign asset and more like software.

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Meta spent $73B on this.

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This is what “starting” really looks like.

Stop waiting for the perfect time.
Stop waiting for the perfect conditions.
Stop waiting for a magic moment.

Action first, clarity later.

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🤖 Amazon isn’t a retail company anymore

It’s one of the largest robotics deployments in history.

Most people missed how fast this happened:

🖱 2013 ~1,000 robots
🖱 2017 ~100,000
🖱 2019 ~200,000
🖱 2021 ~350,000
🖱 2022 ~520,000
🖱 2023 ~750,000
🖱 2024 ~900,000
🖱 2025 ~1,100,000

That implies hundreds of thousands of additional units added each year - thousands deployed every week.

This isn’t “cool tech.”
It’s about labor cost, fulfillment speed, and margin expansion.

Every robot:
🖱 lowers error rates
🖱 cuts operating costs
🖱 compresses cycle times
🖱 boosts unit economics

A bet on $AMZN today is a bet on automation on steroids, not just ecommerce.

The retail margins story hasn’t even started yet.

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❕ Elon Musk has officially launched Colossus 2

🖱 Colossus 2 is the first gigawatt scale AI compute cluster. Its peak power exceeds San Francisco’s maximum electricity demand. The system includes around 550,000 GPUs.

🖱 Musk says the cluster is expected to scale to 1.5 GW by April. At that level, it becomes one of the largest single AI installations ever built.

This sets a new benchmark for standalone data center size. Catching up on raw scale will take competitors time.

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1998: Google valued at $10 million.

2026: Google valued at $4 trillion.

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Define the game you’re playing, and make sure your actions are not being influenced by people playing a different game.

- Morgan Housel

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📈 Memory chip shortages will last beyond 2026, Micron says

🖱 Micron and SK Hynix report that all memory supply for this year is already booked. The main buyers are AI data centers. PC and smartphone makers are now negotiating allocations for periods after 2026.

🖱 Chinese outlet Jiemian reports that Xiaomi, Oppo, and Transsion have cut 2026 smartphone shipment targets due to rising memory costs. Oppo reduced its target by 20%.

🖱 Micron is expanding production in the US and Asia, but new capacity will come online gradually from 2027 to 2030. AI demand is pulling the supply curve forward.

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🔥 2026 could trigger the largest IPO wave since 2019

🖱 OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX are taking early steps toward going public. OpenAI is valued near $500B, Anthropic is in talks around $350B, and SpaceX was last valued at $800B.

🖱 Even one of these listings would rank among the biggest IPOs ever. Together, they would reopen public markets for AI after years of private funding dominance.

🖱 The driver is capital intensity. AI companies now spend tens of billions on compute and infrastructure. Private rounds keep growing, but public markets offer scale in one move.

After a long IPO drought, Wall Street is preparing for deals that could reset expectations for tech listings.

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Assets under management at BlackRock

Last year, BlackRock recorded a record inflow of new capital.

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"The more you learn, the more you'll earn."

- Warren Buffett

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🔽 Meta’s metaverse bet cost about $73B and never scaled

🖱 Reality Labs was meant to move social interaction into Horizon Worlds, grow to 1B users, and create a massive digital commerce layer. Early stats looked promising, but usage stalled and criticism piled up.

🖱 Revenue crossed $1B per quarter only twice. Horizon has about 60M total downloads since 2018. Daily sessions per US user rose slightly, but nowhere near mass adoption. Developer fees reached 47.5%, higher than Apple or Google.

🖱 By late 2025 Meta cut spending, shut VR studios, froze Supernatural content, closed Horizon Workrooms, and began layoffs. Resources are now shifting toward AI and wearables.

🖱 The metaverse idea is not fully abandoned, but the focus moved to smartphones and smart glasses. Ray Ban Meta glasses revenue tripled in 2025.

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⚪️ An era ends for Sony televisions

🖱 Sony signed a memorandum with TCL to form a TV and home audio joint venture controlled by TCL at 51%. Sony keeps 49%. The new company will run the full stack, from design and manufacturing to sales, logistics, and service. Final deals are planned by March, with launch targeted for April 2027.

🖱 Sony and Bravia branding stay. What changes is control. TCL brings scale, vertical integration, and cost efficiency. Sony contributes its image and sound processing tech developed over decades.

🖱 Lower costs for Bravia look likely. TCL also gains direct access to Sony know how. For Sony, this is a clear step back from owning the TV business it once defined.

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🔥 OpenAI targets its first hardware launch in late 2026

🖱 OpenAI says it is on track to unveil its first device in the second half of 2026, according to policy chief Chris Lehane speaking at Axios House Davos. No product details were shared and a retail launch is not yet confirmed.

🖱 CEO Sam Altman has hinted at a new kind of AI device since OpenAI acquired a company founded by former Apple design lead Jony Ive. Reports point to small, screenless hardware, possibly wearable, built around simple interaction rather than apps.

🖱 Lehane said devices are a key focus for 2026, with more information expected later in the year. For now, the timeline signals intent, not a finished product.

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The biggest advantage you can have as an investor is being deeply comfortable with high levels of uncertainty.

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💰 Trump family wealth is now heavily tied to crypto

A Bloomberg analysis puts the family’s net worth at about $6.8B. Around $1.4B of that was added from crypto over the past year, making digital assets close to 20% of total wealth for the first time.

Crypto became the main growth engine:

🖱 World Liberty Financial sold about $550M in tokens, generating roughly $390M for the family
🖱 Founder tokens worth about $3.8B remain locked and excluded from the estimate
🖱 A Trump-branded memecoin is valued at about $280M after liquidity discounts
🖱 American Bitcoin, launched with Hut 8, still leaves Eric Trump’s stake at about $114M despite an 82% share drop

Other parts of the empire moved in the opposite direction:

🖱 Trump Media shares fell 66% over 12 months
🖱 New ventures were announced across prediction markets, crypto funds, defense, and even fusion
🖱 The company remains unprofitable

The family’s balance sheet now moves with crypto markets as much as with property cycles.

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📣 Details emerge behind the Thinking Machines breakup

🖱 At the AI startup founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, two co-founders and several employees left within days. Public explanations conflicted. Reporting since then paints a messier picture.

🖱 Thinking Machines launched in late 2024 after Murati pulled dozens of engineers from OpenAI. The company raised money at a $12B valuation and has a single product, Tinker, a tool for configuring open-source models. At the same time, Murati has been trying to raise a new round at around $50B.

🖱 According to Wired and WSJ, the departures involved internal trust issues, disputes over technical control, personal relationships inside the team, and parallel talks with Meta and OpenAI. One co-founder was fired, then quickly rehired elsewhere.

The timing matters. The exits land while fundraising is ongoing and questions around product direction remain unresolved.

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A headline about Tesla in 2013.

Shares have since risen by 6,173%.

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🔍 Nvidia linked to pirated books used for AI training

A controversial story has surfaced around Nvidia and the use of pirated book datasets to train AI models.

In early 2024, a group of authors sued Nvidia, claiming the company trained models on Books3, a known pirated dataset containing hundreds of copyrighted books. Nvidia responded at the time that this fell under fair use.

The case is still ongoing, but a new filing has added fresh detail. Newly revealed correspondence shows contact between an Nvidia employee and Anna’s Archive, a large shadow library hosting pirated books and academic papers.

What the messages show:

🖱 An Nvidia data strategy employee asked Anna’s Archive what content was available and how to get fast access to a large book corpus

🖱 Anna’s Archive explicitly warned Nvidia that the data was illegally sourced and asked whether the employee had internal approval to use it

🖱 About a week later, Nvidia management reportedly approved the request, citing competitive pressure

🖱 Access was then granted

The exact scale and payment details are unknown, but reports estimate the dataset at roughly 500 terabytes, potentially millions of books.

The situation may go further. The plaintiffs claim Nvidia likely used other shadow libraries such as LibGen, Sci-Hub, and Z-Library, and may have distributed internal scripts allowing corporate clients to automatically download similar datasets. These claims have not yet been proven.

The lawsuit continues.

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