☕️ Spotify's entire music library leaked online

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In today's Techpresso:

🏴‍☠️ Spotify's entire music library leaked online

🚕 Waymo robotaxis blocked traffic during San Francisco blackout

📈 OpenAI doubles compute margins to nearly 70%

📦 Nvidia to ship H200 chips to China by mid-February

💰 Larry Ellison backs Paramount bid with $40 billion

🚕 Uber and Lyft to test Baidu robotaxis in 2026

💥 Alphabet buys data center partner for $4.75 billion

🎁 + 9 other news & articles you might like

🧰 + 6 trending tools

📚 + 2 trending papers & reports

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• Pirate activist group Anna’s Archive claims it has scraped Spotify to build a massive preservation archive containing over 250 million pieces of metadata and millions of actual audio files.
• The group says the 300TB collection covers 99.6% of all Spotify listens, holding the most popular songs in 160kbps quality while less famous tracks are shrunk down to 75kbps.
• Spotify confirmed to Billboard that a third party used illicit tactics to circumvent DRM and access the platform, but it is unclear if the company knew before the public announcement.

• Waymo autonomous vehicles obstructed traffic in San Francisco after a massive power outage disabled city street lights, leaving the driverless cars stranded in the middle of intersections with their hazard lights flashing.
• The company suspended its ride-hailing services while PG&E crews worked to restore power to 130,000 customers affected by a fire at a substation that knocked out the electrical grid on Saturday.
• Although an official explanation is missing, this failure indicates that the Waymo Driver system likely struggled to navigate the streets when it could not detect active traffic light colors or signals.

• OpenAI has reportedly doubled its compute margin to nearly 70 percent since early last year by widening the gap between revenue and the heavy costs of running models for subscribers.
• The startup saw this rate hit 70 percent in October, meaning it has better compute margins than Anthropic for paid customers even though its rival shows better efficiency on server spending.
• Even with better margins, CEO Sam Altman recently declared a code red to fight off Google because the company has not turned a profit amid growing worries about a sector bubble.

• Nvidia plans to send its first batch of H200 AI chips to customers in China before the Lunar New Year in mid-February, following a new US policy allowing exports with a 25% fee.
• Initial deliveries will come from current inventory, totaling roughly 80,000 individual chips, and the company reportedly told clients it will open new capacity to handle additional orders starting in the second quarter of 2026.
• Beijing has not approved these imports yet, and officials are reviewing a proposal that would require buyers to bundle every foreign H200 chip purchase with a specific ratio of domestic AI chips.

• Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison is providing an irrevocable personal guarantee of $40.4 billion in equity financing to back Paramount’s amended $108.4 billion hostile takeover offer for Warner Bros. Discovery Inc.
• The billionaire agreed not to revoke the Ellison family trust or adversely transfer its assets while the transaction is pending, aiming to fix what the board called an unknown and opaque revocable trust.
• As Paramount increased its regulatory reverse termination fee to $5.8 billion, rival bidder Netflix announced it has refinanced part of a $59 billion bridge loan with cheaper and longer-term debt.

• Uber and Lyft say they will add Baidu’s Apollo Go autonomous vehicles to their apps for pilot programs in London starting in 2026 as the UK opens up to driverless cars.
• Lyft CEO David Risher confirmed his company will start with a fleet of dozens of robotaxis before scaling up to hundreds, while Uber expects its initial pilot to begin during the first half of 2026.
• These new moves arrive as competitor Waymo also prepares to test its fleet in the same market, taking advantage of updated government plans that permit autonomous driving technology on public roads next spring.

• Google parent Alphabet is spending $4.75 billion in cash to acquire Intersect, a data center and energy infrastructure company, to help speed up the construction of its power generation projects.
• While the agreement includes the assumption of debt, Alphabet says Intersect will keep its operations independent as it works to bring more data center and generation capacity online much faster.
• Sundar Pichai says the deal helps them operate more nimbly in building new power generation in lockstep with new data center load to reimagine energy solutions and drive US leadership.

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• Instacart ends AI-driven price experiments after criticism LINK

• Japan’s new flagship H3 rocket fails to put geolocation satellite into orbit LINK

• Apple cozies up to Samsung as RAM gets ridiculously expensive LINK

• Apple Still Testing Ultra-Thin Glass to Eliminate Foldable iPhone Crease LINK

• Alibaba's Qwen releases AI model that splits images into editable layers like Photoshop LINK

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📚 Trending papers & reports

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