Morning Scan

The AI infrastructure money keeps flowing uphill — chips getting pricier, capital getting bigger, and everyone from Alibaba to Nvidia placing bets that assume the boom has more room to run. The trade war with Canada is turning into the kind of story that shows up in your grocery bill before it shows up in headlines.

15%+ — The price hike Nvidia is telling top customers to expect on Vera Rubin and Grace Blackwell systems starting early 2027. (Bloomberg)

Machines & Minds

Alibaba is raising $10.2bn and spending all of it on AI

No hedging here — every dollar of this Hong Kong share placement is earmarked for AI infrastructure. (The Next Web)

Nvidia AI server prices are rising more than 15% from early next year

Memory costs are squeezing margins up the chain, and Nvidia's customers are the ones absorbing it. (The Next Web)

Nvidia plans to use its $6B Poolside deal to build a US alternative to Chinese AI models (paywall)

An open-weight play aimed squarely at DeepSeek and Kimi — Nvidia hedging against its own chips powering the competition. (WSJ)

A mysterious stealth model just went viral offering 100 trillion free tokens a day

Nobody knows who's behind Ox Alpha, but the guesswork points to Zhipu's unreleased GLM — free-token giveaways are the new marketing budget. (Wccftech)

Harvey's first in-house model for legal work is here

Tenet is built on a Chinese open-weight base — another reminder that "American AI" and "Chinese AI" are getting hard to cleanly separate. (The Next Web)

Commerce Rewired

U.S. Economy Could Feel the Sting From Trade War With Canada (paywall)

The 50% tariff fight is tit-for-tat by design, but the headaches land on consumers who didn't pick a side. (NYT)

Dutch Regulator Fines Uber $1 Billion for Suspending Dishonest Drivers

€825 million for automated deactivations — Europe's algorithmic-accountability rules just got real teeth. (Reuters via Daring Fireball)

Paramount and California to hold preliminary talks on Warner Bros. deal (paywall)

Early-stage talks to defuse the 12-state lawsuit blocking the $111B merger — a long way from settled. (NYT)

Connected World

Amazon just hiked prices for Echo, Fire TV, and Kindle by up to 60 percent

The Echo Dot jumped from $49.99 to $79.99 overnight — hardware margins finally catching up to reality. (The Verge)

Flipkart Minutes is now delivering up to 1.2M orders a day

Nearly triple its November volume — Walmart's quick-commerce bet in India is compounding fast. (TechCrunch)

Semiconductor cram schools are flourishing in Seoul (paywall)

Samsung and SK Hynix bonuses are hot enough that Korean students are studying for chip-company entrance exams like it's the SAT. (FT)