Apple iPhone sales are down, says IDC

-4.1%

Apple iPhone shipments were down 4.1% year on year during its very important holiday quarter, IDC reports. That’s as overall global smartphone shipments increased 2.4%, thanks to the growth of Chinese vendors who focus on low-end devices.

Those numbers are roughly in line with others released yesterday by Counterpoint Research, which estimated that Apple’s smartphone sales declined 5% last quarter. IDC’s numbers bring Apple’s global smartphone market share in 2024 down to 18.7% from 20.1% in 2023, as the company’s AI phone so far has failed to drive a meaningful upgrade cycle.

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Jon Keegan2h

Musk: xAI to build 500-megawatt data center in Saudi Arabia with Humain using Nvidia GPUs

Today in Washington, DC, Elon Musk announced that xAI is developing a 500-megawatt AI data center in Saudi Arabia in partnership with Humain — the country’s state-owned AI company — using Nvidia chips.

Competitors OpenAI and Anthropic are also turning to access the vast stores of capital available from Middle East investors to fund their colossal data center plans.

In an awkward moment, Musk briefly appeared confused if the deal was for 500 megawatts or 500 gigawatts, pausing only to have Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang jump in and confirm it was for 500 megawatts.

Laughing off the gaffe, Musk joked about the cost of such a large project, saying, “That’ll be eight bazillion trillion dollars.”

Musk’s xAI to Build 500 Megawatt Data Center in Saudi Arabia

In an awkward moment, Musk briefly appeared confused if the deal was for 500 megawatts or 500 gigawatts, pausing only to have Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang jump in and confirm it was for 500 megawatts.

Laughing off the gaffe, Musk joked about the cost of such a large project, saying, “That’ll be eight bazillion trillion dollars.”

David Crowther

VEND FOR YOURSELF

Gemini 3 is insanely good at visual reasoning... and running a vending machine

Google’s stock is up maybe because Gemini 3 is good and its powered mostly by Google’s TPUs — or, maybe, because Alphabet’s about to launch a vending machine business.

Robot buying a drink from vending machine

Rani Molla7h

Google soars on positive reception for Gemini 3

Google is surging today, on track for its third-biggest daily gain this year, after its release of Gemini 3 on Tuesday.

The latest update to its flagship model includes significant improvements to reasoning, agentic tasks, and “vibe coding,” and is currently topping the leaderboards on LMArena for text, web development, and vision.

Gemini is currently No. 2 in Apple’s free App Store, right behind ChatGPT.

AI Chatbots are also increasingly gaining favor as replacements for traditional web search, a multibillion-dollar business that Google has owned for decades. Beyond just chatbots, Gemini’s performance is crucial to Google’s future success as the company embeds its AI models across its products and relies on them to generate new revenue from existing lines — particularly by driving growth in Cloud and reinforcing its ad and search dominance.

The stock was recently up 5.6% amid a generally green day for tech stocks.

Google has been on a tear lately, after posting Q3 revenue and earnings that blew past expectations. On Friday, the stock jumped after Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway revealed a $5.1 billion stake and after the company announced a $40 billion investment in Texas data centers.

Google has been by far the best performer of the Magnificent 7 stocks this year, up nearly 60% in 2025. The next best is Nvidia, which is up 39%, followed by Microsoft, which is up 17%.

Jon Keegan7h

Report: xAI raising $15 billion for a $230 billion valuation

xAI is looking to raise $15 billion at a $230 billion valuation, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.

xAI is still burning through cash as it races to build its Colossus 2 data center in Tennessee. Last month, it was reported that the company needs to spend $18 billion to purchase another 300,000 Nvidia GPUs.

For all that cash, xAI is still in third place when it comes to its Grok chatbot. A September report found that Grok had only 64 million monthly users, compared to ChatGPT’s 800 million weekly users.

Tom Jones

40% of middle and high school students spend about half the school day on devices

A recent NYT survey of US teachers reveals how much screentime American students get in class.

laptop with School textbooks popping out of the screen on a spring

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