China's chips, browser agents & more (January 29, 2026)

Good morning,

Capital, compute, and control all collided overnight. Chips are moving across borders again, Big Tech is doubling down on AI spend, and agents are quietly creeping into everyday products.

Let’s dive in 👇

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🌏 Global AI Power Plays

🔌 China Reopens the AI Chip Spigot

China approved imports of Nvidia’s high-end AI chips after weeks of uncertainty, allowing hundreds of thousands of H200 GPUs back into the country. The move signals a temporary thaw in tech controls as Chinese firms race to keep models competitive. It also underscores how dependent large-scale AI still is on US-designed silicon.

🤖 Chrome Gets an Auto-Browse Agent

Google has begun rolling out Chrome’s Auto-Browse AI agent that can navigate pages and complete tasks for users. This pushes AI agents directly into the browser layer, not just chat interfaces. It hints at a future where “using the web” becomes a delegated background process.

💰 Microsoft’s OpenAI Bet Pays Off

Microsoft disclosed $7.6B in OpenAI-related revenue during earnings, validating its massive infrastructure and model investments. AI is now a material line item, not an experiment. The numbers strengthen Microsoft’s position as the default enterprise AI backbone.

🚀 Big Bets, Bigger Expectations

🧠 Tesla Quietly Backed xAI

Tesla invested $2B into Elon Musk’s xAI, tightening the ecosystem between Musk’s companies. The move blurs lines between automaker, robotics firm, and AI lab. Investors are effectively betting on vertical integration across data, compute, and deployment.

📈 Wall Street Backs Zuckerberg’s AI Push

Mark Zuckerberg got the green light from Wall Street to aggressively invest in AI infrastructure and products. Meta is framing spend as necessary, not optional, to stay relevant. The tolerance for near-term losses shows how existential AI has become.

🛰️ SpaceX Eyes Public Markets

SpaceX’s potential public market entry is already heating up secondaries, driven largely by its AI-powered satellite and launch data advantages. Investors see SpaceX as both aerospace and data infrastructure. AI is now part of the bull case.

🧰 Tools of the Day

→ Pandada AI – Automates document and data workflows using lightweight agents.
→ Gemini 6 – Google’s latest multimodal model with faster reasoning and tool use.
→ The Prompting Company – Enterprise prompt libraries and governance tooling.

⚡ Quick Hits

→ Moltbot AI raises security concerns over assistant data handling.
→ Amazon found illegal content in AI training datasets.
→ Zuckerberg teases agentic commerce tools for 2026.
→ US cyber chief leaked secrets via ChatGPT upload.
→ ServiceNow partners again, this time with Anthropic.
→ Outtake raises $40M for AI security tooling.
→ WhatsApp will charge AI bots in Italy.

🧠 TLDR

China reopening access to Nvidia chips shows geopolitics still bends to compute demand. Browsers and platforms are embedding agents directly, making AI less visible but more powerful. Meanwhile, Big Tech and top investors are fully committed, treating AI spend as existential infrastructure, not speculative R&D.

Cheers,
David