PayPal confirmed it will support Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol, with its payment option set to appear in a new AI-driven checkout introduced on Sunday at the NRF convention in New York. The move follows a collaboration announced last September and coincides with PayPal Ventures’ participation in Klearly’s €12 million Series A.

Meta plans to reduce headcount at Reality Labs by around 10%, which could affect roughly 1,500 employees, with an announcement possible as soon as Tuesday, according to the New York Times. The shift aligns with budget moves toward AI and wearables as the metaverse unit faces sizable losses and softer user adoption.

US President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that major technology firms should shoulder the electricity costs of their data centers so ordinary Americans do not face higher utility bills, after US power prices climbed around 40% over five years. He highlighted ongoing work with Microsoft, which is set to implement significant changes this week, while separate industry estimates point to rapidly rising electricity demand from data centers and AI workloads through 2030.

On January 12, 2026, Qatar is scheduled to sign the Pax Silica agreement, with the UAE set to follow on January 15, joining a U.S.-backed alliance focused on AI and semiconductor supply chains. The initiative groups nine countries in a "coalition of capabilities" to strengthen technology networks and reduce reliance on rival powers. Plans for 2026 include expanding membership, launching strategic projects and aligning policies to protect critical infrastructure and advanced technologies.

LG AI Research's K-Exaone foundational model has secured seventh place on the Intelligence Index compiled by Artificial Analysis, making it the only Korean entry in a top 10 otherwise dominated by US and Chinese systems. The model, built on a 236 billion-parameter MoE architecture and optimized for A100-class GPUs, topped 10 of 13 benchmark tests in a government-led competition and is available as an open-weight model on Hugging Face with free API access through January 28.

On Saturday, January 10, 2026, Elon Musk said X will roll out an update in seven days that exposes the code deciding which posts and ads appear in users' feeds. The platform plans to rely more heavily on its Grok AI chatbot to evaluate posts daily, even as regulators in multiple countries criticize Grok over sexually explicit image generation and consider or impose access restrictions.

On January 10 2026, leading Chinese AI researchers in Beijing said China could produce a world-leading AI company within three to five years, even though the US still dominates computing power. They warned that the main obstacle is the lack of advanced chipmaking tools, with a prototype extreme-ultraviolet lithography machine not expected to yield working chips until 2030. Investors have shown strong interest as MiniMax and Zhipu AI made notable debuts on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, while local firms experiment with running large AI models on smaller, cheaper hardware under tight budgets.

Meta secured 20-year nuclear power agreements with Vistra, Oklo and TerraPower to supply its Prometheus AI data center. On January 9, 2026, Vistra rose 10.5% to $166.38 and Oklo closed 7.9% higher, while Meta said the combined arrangements could support up to 6.6 GW of clean energy by 2035.