The AI Daily Brief: Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis
Are Markets Still Worried About an AI Bubble?
30 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What signals are markets sending about an AI bubble?
Today on the AI Daily Brief, as Meta and Microsoft report earnings, are markets still worried about an AI bubble? Before that, on the headlines, SoftBank appears ready to double down on OpenAI with another $30 billion investment. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. All right, friends, quick announcements before we dive in.
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Chapter 2: How is SoftBank's investment in OpenAI shaping the AI landscape?
Now, one more thing that you can find at AIdailybrief.ai, we have a new thing we're doing, which is in conjunction with AIDB Intel, which is a monthly pulse survey to figure out how people are using AI and how it's changing. You can find a link on the main AIdailybrief.ai website, and it's a short survey that should take much less than five minutes.
It basically asks things like, which AI models did you use this month? Which AI model did you use the most? What was your most important use case? All in a very easy checkbox, multiple choice style format. It's part of our larger goal of helping people have up-to-date actual data about what's going on with AI. And I would so appreciate it if you would take a couple minutes to fill it out.
Anyone who contributes will get first access to the results at least a week before they are available for general consumption. And again, you can find everything about that at ai-dailybrief.ai. Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief Headlines Edition, all the daily AI news you need in around five minutes. What's $30 billion between friends, right?
Mazesan is in for another $30 billion as SoftBank appears to double down on OpenAI. The Wall Street Journal reports that SoftBank is in talks to invest another crisp $30 billion into OpenAI's next monster fundraising round. Now, SoftBank is already one of OpenAI's largest shareholders, with a roughly 11% stake after investing $30 billion last year.
That funding seemed to stretch SoftBank's pockets, with the firm selling off Nvidia stock and taking loans against their AMD holdings to make it work. While rumors have been sparse, reporting from December suggested that OpenAI is targeting $100 billion in fundraising this year. The valuation is said to be $830 billion, which is another 66% jump from the $500 billion valuation struck in October.
Frankly, it looks like they're well on their way, with separate reports suggesting that Nvidia, Microsoft, and Amazon are looking to participate to the tune of $60 billion between them.
Now, in my 2026 predictions, I debated a bunch, but I ultimately came to the base case that I didn't think that Anthropic or OpenAI would actually go public in 2026, with the reason being that A, public markets are kind of a pain in the butt, and B, I thought that there was just going to be enough funding for them in private markets that they weren't going to be forced to go public.
Now the capital needs are extreme here, and so maybe they just have to take advantage of every option they have, including IPO. But with OpenAI well on their way to that $100 billion round, they certainly are going to have their options. Moving over to OpenAI competitor Anthropic, ServiceNow has signed another big AI deal, this time with Anthropic, partnering with the lab along multiple angles.
The multi-year deal includes making Claude the default model across ServiceNow's platform. Claude will also drive their agent builder, which allows users to create custom workflows and vibe code apps. In addition, Claude access is being rolled out to all 29,000 ServiceNow employees, including Claude Code for the engineering team.
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Chapter 3: What are the implications of Meta's aggressive AI spending?
Lastly today, another one that harkens back to one of the discussions in my 2026 predictions, Tesla has made a $2 billion investment into XAI in defiance of a shareholder vote. Elon Musk has been toying with the idea of cross-investment between his two companies over the past year. The matter went to a shareholder vote in November, with over a billion votes in favor and 916 million against.
A significant number of shareholders abstained from voting, which counts as a vote against under Tesla's bylaws, meaning the vote technically failed. However, it seems that near enough was good enough for Musk. Tesla disclosed in a shareholder's letter on Wednesday that they made a $2 billion investment in XAI's recent fundraising round.
And the investment is apparently all part of the plan, with Tesla writing, As set forth in Master Plan Part 4, Tesla is building products and services that bring AI into the physical world. Meanwhile, XAI is developing leading digital AI products and services such as its LLM, Grok.
In that context, and as part of Tesla's broader strategy under Master Plan Part 4, Tesla and XAI also entered into a framework agreement in connection with the investment.
Now, Tesla has already collaborated with XAI by providing them batteries for power redundancy at their data centers, and XAI has also provided Grok and some Tesla vehicles, and there's plans to use XAI models to power the Optimus robots. In the shareholders' letter, Musk wrote, If there are things XAI can help accelerate our progress, then why should we not do that?
And that is the reason why we've gone ahead with such an investment, because this is part of the strategic initiative. Now, the investment comes as Tesla hits a pretty rough patch. During their Wednesday night earnings call, Tesla disclosed a 61% drop in profits year over year.
They announced that the Model 3 and Model X will be discontinued, with the production line repurposed for Optimus robots. Musk told investors on the call, This year for Tesla is the first major steps as we increase vehicle autonomy and begin to produce Optimus robots at scale. We're making very, very big investments. So this is going to be a very big capex here.
That is deliberate because we're making big investments for an epic future. Back in July of last year, 0xmo on Twitter wrote, Tesla will acquire XAI. There's no way around it. Grok will be the brain for Optimus, so you can't have the brain and the body made by different teams. It doesn't get you the best product, and it's not Elon style. I give it around 12 months.
Reflecting on the recent news, the same account wrote, Tesla is investing in XAI and collaborating even closer. It's happening. Now that is going to do it for our headlines, but for the rest of today, we are going to stay on public market themes. Moving now to ask, are markets still worried about an AI bubble? All right, friends, quick break to talk about a question I hear constantly.
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Chapter 4: How is Microsoft responding to competition from Anthropic?
Compare that with the theme explored by Bloomberg columnist Dave Lee in his piece published on Thursday morning called Microsoft Has Lost Its AI Sparkle. Dave writes, Who could forget those heady days when Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella looked like the smartest man in tech?
When ChatGPT emerged in late 2022, his decision to back OpenAI put Nadella's company at the forefront of the AI boom. More recently, the relationship has cooled and with it the perceived value of Nadella's foresight. Microsoft is now invested in Anthropic and look to incorporate its capabilities into its products. An open AI hungry for computing power has turned to Oracle, Google, and Amazon.
All of this AI polyamory has put Microsoft's eggs in a few more baskets, but it has also highlighted that Microsoft's early mover advantage has run its course. The AI sparkle that illuminated the market value, that more than doubled, has diminished.
The thorny issue of ROI is stalking all the top AI players, but the pressure has mounted on Adela because of the shifting narrative of the AI industry. The AI story of 2026 so far is one that says Google, with its Gemini model, is crushing it with consumer use cases and benefiting from the availability and lower cost of its own chips.
At the same time, Anthropic's coding capabilities are at the leading edge of redefining software engineering. Whatever the reason, with its huge base of enterprise users and ownership of the coding mega-platform GitHub, Microsoft stands accused of letting its advantages dwindle.
Now, Dave does end on a positive note, reminding us all that Microsoft's critics today were Google's critics yesterday, but pointing out that Microsoft has to do something to shift the narrative back in its favor. Now, one more market story to really round things out and let us know where we stand. We also got earnings reports from South Korean memory giants Samsung and SK Hyang.
If you've been keeping an eye on RAM prices recently, you probably already know how this went. Samsung reported that profits had doubled from this time last year, reaching $13.7 billion. This was a 61% increase from the previous quarter, vastly outpaced already lofty analyst estimates. Stripping out just the memory division, profits were up fivefold year over year.
Samsung said that they would, quote, proactively address market demand by focusing on high value-added products. In other words, they will prioritize high bandwidth memory for AI chips and make as much money as they possibly can. The story was similar for SK Hynix, who doubled operating profit to $13.5 billion. Again, a massive beat on estimates.
Numerous comments from analysts noted that the current memory shortage isn't likely to see relief anytime soon. Richard Claude of Janus Henderson said, there are no easy wins in levers from a supply perspective to meet this new demand driver.
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