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Jan 30, 2026
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Supported by
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TGIF! The iPhone 17 lineup fuels Apple's fastest quarterly revenue growth in years. Meta forecasts a 73% jump in 2026 capital expenditure. ByteDance and Alibaba are poised for big model releases in race for AI supremacy in China.
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Apple reported its fastest growth in years, fueled by its latest-generation iPhone 17 lineup. The iPhone business grew 23% to $85.3 billion in sales for the December quarter, the company reported Thursday afternoon. It’s the fastest pace of growth Apple has seen since 2021, when the pandemic supercharged the tech giant’s bottom line. Apple’s overall revenue was $143.8 billion, up 16% from the prior year, beating analyst estimates of $138.5 billion. Net income was $42.1 billion, up 16% annually, compared to $39.4 billion analysts were expecting. Even on the strength of the results, Apple shares were up only 1% in after-hours trading following the release. Apple said it expects more rapid growth to persist. For the current quarter, the company expects sales to
grow between 13% and 16% annually. Apple executives said that memory shortages had minimal effect so far on the company’s margins. The massive artificial intelligence data center build-out has consumed much of the supply for memory chips. But the memory crunch could affect the current March quarter’s margins.
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ByteDance and Alibaba Group are both preparing to release their next flagship AI models around the Lunar New Year holiday in mid-February, in what could be the most consequential battle in the country’s tech sector, The Information reported. ByteDance is preparing to launch Doubao 2.0, its new flagship large language model, Seedream 5.0, an image generation model, and SeedDance 2.0, a video generation model. Alibaba, meanwhile, is working on its new flagship model, Qwen 3.5. The AI model development race is part of the two tech giant’s intensifying rivalry. ByteDance’s fast-growing cloud computing business has used its AI services to challenge Alibaba, whose cloud arm is the biggest in China. Alibaba plans to make a big holiday marketing push for its Qwen AI app for consumers, in a challenge to ByteDance’s popular Doubao chatbot, China’s largest AI app by users.
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The chair of the U.S. House Committee on China said Nvidia’s “extensive technical support” of Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek helped the startup develop “frontier” AI models despite export controls that limited its access to Nvidia’s most advanced hardware, according to a letter seen by The Information. He also shared concerns that DeepSeek has a relationship with the Chinese Communist Party and its military. In the letter, addressed to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick—who is responsible for setting rules on how Nvidia chips are sold outside the U.S.—Michigan Rep. John Moolenaar said documents he requested from Nvidia show the firm helped DeepSeek with the “co-design of algorithms, frameworks, and hardware.” The challenge of selling Nvidia hardware to business customers in China is
that they could end up aiding that country’s government or military in ways that pose a threat to the U.S., he said. While Moolenaar did not claim DeepSeek was collaborating closely with the Chinese military while it was working closely with Nvidia, Moolenaar said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has a “blindness” to the potential that this type of relationship could occur in the future. (DeepSeek models are open-weight, meaning anyone, including militaries, can use them for free.) A spokesperson for Nvidia did not comment on its relationship with DeepSeek but said “it makes no sense for the Chinese military to depend on American technology.” The letter was first reported by Reuters.
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Apple has acquired Q.ai, an artificial intelligence startup specializing in “silent” communication technology. Founded in 2022, the Israel-based startup has largely kept its plans under wraps. Patents published last year describe technology for processing facial movements to understand nonvocal communication. Such technology could be useful across a range of Apple products, allowing users to interact with voice assistants in noisy environments or in public spaces where speaking aloud is intrusive. Over the years, Apple has been adding voice communication features to its AirPods, such as live translation. It is also working on an AI-based wearable pin, which will feature cameras and microphones, that could be released as early as 2027, The Information previously reported. The Israel-based startup was cofounded by Aviad Maizels, who sold a previous company, PrimeSense, to Apple in 2013 for $345 million. PrimeSense’s technology was used for Apple’s face identification feature first introduced in the iPhone X in 2017. The Financial Times reported that the deal was valued at close to $2 billion. If accurate, it would make it one of the largest acquisitions for the famously
acquisition-averse tech giant, second only to its $3 billion acquisition of Beats in 2014. While tech rivals have ramped up on their AI spending, Apple has largely avoided splurging.
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The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which regulates prediction markets such as Kalshi and Polymarket in the U.S., plans to make new rules to provide clearer standards on the types of contracts such platforms can offer, the agency’s chairman Michael Selig said Thursday. The CFTC also plans to withdraw a Biden-era proposal that would ban political and sports-related bets, the two most popular types of bets on prediction markets. Currently, states regulate sports betting and some have sued to stop prediction markets from offering those wagers, which they argue counts as illegal gambling. The chairs of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the CFTC vowed to cooperate and make rules to support the crypto industry in their first-ever joint meeting on Thursday. Their efforts are important for crypto firms, given Congress has struggled to pass a crypto market structure bill after Coinbase pulled back its support over issues including stablecoin rewards this month.
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