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1.	Apple Partners with Google for Upcoming Siri Overhaul By Aaron Tilley Source: The Information

Apple has struck a multi-year partnership with Alphabet-owned Google to help the iPhone maker get its artificial intelligence products back on track. Google's Gemini will power the company's Apple Intelligence features, including the delayed overhaul of Apple's lagging Siri voice assistant.

"After careful evaluation, Apple determined that Google's Al technology provides the most capable foundation for Apple Foundation Models and is excited about the innovative new experiences it will unlock for Apple users," an Apple spokesperson sent in a statement.

Apple said that the Google partnership won't violate the company's existing privacy commitments. The AI will run either on device or through Apple-owned servers it calls Private Cloud Compute.

Apple was evaluating its internal models and external versions from Google, OpenAI and Anthropic as part of its plan to bolster its AI strategy. Google has improved Gemini a considerable amount since the AI model's initial release in late 2023, but the longstanding relationship between Apple and Google also likely helped. Google has been Apple's default search engine provider since the early 2000s.

2.	Meta Appoints Dina Powell McCormick as President and Vice Chair By Martin Peers Source: The Information

Meta Platforms appointed former Goldman Sachs banker and White House official Dina Powell McCormick as president and vice chairman, bringing in an executive with long experience in both government and global finance to help the social media company as it spends heavily on AI development.

In a statement, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said McCormick's experience "makes her uniquely suited to help Meta manage this next phase of growth." McCormick had joined the board of Meta last year but resigned just before Christmas. The company said in the statement that McCormick "will partner with the compute and infrastructure teams to ensure our multi-billion dollar investments executive against our goals."

McCormick was deputy national security advisor to President Trump in his first term and also worked in the administration of President George W. Bush. In a Truth Social post, Trump lauded McCormick as "fantastic and very talented," making clear she will help Meta's relations with the White House. McCormick also spent 16 years at Goldman Sachs and most recently was vice chair and president of BDT & MSD Partners.

3.	TSMC to Significantly Expand Chipmaking Investments in the U.S. By Jing Yang Source: The New York Times

The Trump administration is close to reaching a trade deal with Taiwan that involves significantly more investments from the island's largest company, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, according to The New York Times, citing people familiar with the matter.

The potential deal will cut U.S. tariffs on Taiwanese imports to 15% and require TSMC to build at least five more chip fabrication facilities in Arizona, doubling the number of plants the company has previously committed to in the state.

TSMC, which produces 90% of the world's advanced chips, announced in March that it would invest $100 billion to build three new chip-making plants, in addition to three facilities planned previously. President Donald Trump hailed the deal as the largest foreign direct investment in U.S. history.

4.	CoreWeave Hits First Data Center Milestone in Texas, Internal Message Shows By Anissa Gardizy Source: The Information

CoreWeave hit its first chip delivery milestone at a data center in Denton, Texas, that it's building for OpenAI, according to an internal Slack message from executives. Late last year, it warned investors that its fourth quarter revenue would take a hit because of delays with one of its data center providers.

The delay in Denton became a high profile example of the growing "blame game" among data center builders, as construction and deployment delays become more common across the AI infrastructure industry.

"We've hit this milestone under an intense spotlight," CoreWeave executives wrote in the Slack message. "The last several months tested us in ways few companies ever experience. There were setbacks from partners and factors outside our control."

CoreWeave told employees that it went from a "few racks delivered in mid-November" to more than 16,000 GPUs by the end of December. Leaders noted that there was a single day when it brought more than 2,000 GPUs online. The Slack message was from Chief Operating Officer Sachin Jain, Chief Technology Officer Peter Salanki and Senior Vice President of Engineering Chen Goldberg.

5.	Trump Signals White House Working With Microsoft, Others on Electricity Costs By Anissa Gardizy Source: The Information

President Donald Trump said in a Truth Social post on Monday that his administration is working with technology companies, including Microsoft, to prevent data centers from driving up household electricity bills.

Trump blamed rising utility costs on former President Joe Biden and said Americans should not "pay higher Electricity bills because of data centers."

"First up is Microsoft, who my team has been working with, and which will make major changes beginning this week to ensure that Americans don't 'pick up the tab' for their power consumption, in the form of paying higher utility bills," he wrote. He added that there will be more announcements in the coming weeks.

Microsoft is expected to make an announcement on Tuesday related to Trump's comments.

6.	Meta Plans to Cut 10% of Reality Labs Employees, Report Says By Martin Peers Source: New York Times

Meta Platforms plans to cut about 10% of its Reality Labs employees, the New York Times reported, with the cuts coming as soon as Tuesday. The report follows a Business Insider report late last week that said Reality Labs chief Andrew Bosworth had called an all-hands meeting for Tuesday, and stressed everyone should attend.

Reality Labs has about 15,000 people, so a 10% cut would only amount to 1,500 people. Still, it would signal that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is curtailing Reality Labs' spending after years of steadily mounting losses. Reality Labs has lost $70 billion since 2021. The cuts come as Meta is massively ramping up its spending on AI.

7.	House Passes Bill to Limit China's Remote Access to U.S. Chips By Juro Osawa Source: The Information

The House of Representatives on Monday passed a bipartisan bill that expands U.S. export controls to restrict Chinese companies' ability to remotely access advanced American AI chips at data centers outside China.

The bill, the Remote Access Security Act, is the latest step in Washington's effort to limit China's use of critical U.S. technologies due to national security concerns. It is aimed at regulating Chinese companies that use cloud computing services to rent servers equipped with Nvidia's AI chips at data centers located in Southeast Asia or other regions outside China.

Such offshore arrangements have become common among Chinese companies as a way to get around U.S. export controls that ban the sale of advanced U.S. chips to China, The Information reported previously. The demand from Chinese companies has helped accelerate the construction of more AI data centers in Southeast Asia. If the bill passes the Senate and becomes law, it could have a big impact on existing cloud server deals involving Chinese companies.

"This bill brings our laws into the digital age and makes it clear that cloud compute is subject to U.S. export control law, just like physical chips. Closing these loopholes will strengthen U.S. national security and protect American innovation," said John Moolenaar, chairman of the U.S. House Select Committee on China.

8.	Anthropic's Amodei: AI Could Make CRISPR-Level Advances By Sri Muppidi Source: The Information

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei on Monday laid out the startup's vision for how AI could solve problems in healthcare and the life sciences, from speeding up drug approvals by streamlining clinical trial paperwork to treating or even eradicating tropical diseases.

AI could play a "central role in multiple discoveries that are on the level of significance of [gene-editing] tech CRISPR," he said at an event in San Francisco.

Anthropic held the event a day after announcing new features for its Claude chatbot and AI models that allow healthcare providers, patients and insurance companies to use its AI for medical tasks. These tasks could range from pulling information from large databases, such as those that determine medicare coverage, and prioritizing urgent issues from hundreds of patient messages.

Amodei envisioned a future in which doctors and large language models work together  "to both empower the patient and enable the doctor to get the most out of the LLM and learn from the LLM." Still, he noted, AI is "not a replacement for a doctor," but rather, "it's a second opinion."

Amodei, chief product officer Mike Krieger and Anthropic's head of biology and life sciences, Eric Kauderer-Abrams, made the presentation as competition with OpenAI intensifies. Last week, OpenAI unveiled new healthcare features for ChatGPT and on Monday agreed to buy healthcare startup Torch.

9.	Meta Forms New Initiative to Plan for Compute Needs By Nick Wingfield Source: The Information

Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company has created a new "top-level" effort called Meta Compute to oversee the construction and long term planning for the company's data center needs.

In a post on his Facebook account, Zuckerberg said Meta Compute will be co-led by Santosh Janardhan, Meta's head of global infrastructure, and Daniel Gross, a vice president of product. Janardhan will continue to oversee the design, building and operation of Meta's fleet of global datacenters, while Gross will lead a new group responsible for capacity strategy, Zuckerberg wrote. The two executives will work closely with Dina Powell McCormick, who joined Meta on Monday as its president and vice chairman, he wrote.

Meta is pouring billions of dollars into its AI efforts. Zuckerberg said the company plans to build tens of gigawatts of computing capacity this decade and hundreds of gigawatts or more over time.

10.	Paramount Plans Proxy Battle for WBD Board Seats By Martin Peers Source: The Information

The Ellison family's Paramount Skydance plans to run a proxy battle to win seats on Warner Bros. Discovery's board at this spring's annual meeting, Paramount said on Monday, outlining its next steps in its fight to win the bidding war for WBD. Paramount said it also sued WBD in Delaware Chancery Court.

Paramount has offered $30 a share in cash for WBD, but the entertainment company has rejected the offer in favor of a deal to sell its streaming operations an film studio to Netflix, while separating its cable channels into a separate company. Paramount said the window for nominating candidates for WBD's board at the annual meeting opens in three weeks, and it plans to nominate a slate of candidates who would strike a deal to sell the company to Paramount.

In its suit in Delaware, Paramount is asking the court to direct WBD to provide more information about the Netflix deal. As Paramount noted, WBD has not said how it values the standalone cable channel company, or how WBD's debt will be allocated between the cable channel offshoot and the operations being sold to Netflix. WBD shareholders need the information, Paramount said, to be able to make an "informed investment decision" on its offer.

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