It’s not a conspiracy. We don’t think anyway. Plus, RAMageddon expands to take down the Steam Machine and NVIDIA GPUs.
Starring Tom Merritt and Huyen Tue Dao
TOM: This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, February 5th, 2026. We tell you what you need to know, give you the important context, and help each other understand.
HUYEN: Today great news for Google means more conspiracy theories about Apple.
I’m Tom Merritt,
I’m Huyen Tue Dao.
TOM: Let’s start with what you need to know with the big story.
[[BIG STORY]]
Alphabet/Google Revenues Up 18 Percent to $113.8 Billion
Google set to double AI spending to $185bn after strong earnings
Google looks to plow approx $180B into datacenters this year
Google & Apple CEOs offer seemingly contradictory AI details
Google’s subscriptions rise in Q4 as YouTube pulls $60B in yearly revenue
TOM: Alphabet released its earnings on Wednesday, and we picked out the highlights you need to know.
The top line is that revenue is still growing, up 15% on the year. Net income was up 24.3%.
74% of that was ad-based, which rose 17%. Google says Gemini has improved ad relevance, letting it deliver ads on longer, more complex searches that were hard to monetize in the past.
YouTube revenue rose 17% with 325 million paying users across YouTube Premium and Google One, up from 300 million last quarter. -YouTube Shorts recorded 200 billion average daily views, even from last year.
And it’s not just ads. Google Cloud revenue was up 47% on the year.
And Google is ready to cash in on all that revenue. It annocuned it will almost double its capital expenditures, stuff it spends on infrastructure, from 91.4 billion last year to between 175 and 185 billion this year. 60% of that will be upgrading assets to new TPUs and NVIDIA GPUs, split evenly between Google’s own business needs and Google Cloud. 40% will go to building new data centers. Revenue of 400 billion and free cash flow of $24.5 billion last quarter alone give them the freedom to do that.
Gemini has more than 750 million monthly active users, up 100 million from last quarter.
And one aspect of the earnings call that got a lot of notice was CEO Sundar Pichai’s reticence on talking about the deal with Apple to provide Gemini as a service. Pichai said, “We are collaborating with Apple as their preferred cloud provider and to develop the next generation of Apple Foundation Models, based on Gemini technology.”
Many outlets are trying to stretch this to show Apple or Google is hiding something or lying, as Apple emphasizes it will control your data in its models.
I think Apple Insider’s Wesley Hilliard nailed it:
“Apple and Google have partnered to utilize a version of Gemini built to run on Apple’s Private Cloud Compute servers to train Apple Foundation Models and make them more capable. The resulting Apple Foundation Models will power Apple Intelligence and Siri both on-device and in Private Cloud Compute, and those servers will be either Apple’s or Google’s while upholding Apple’s privacy standards.” Basically the way that Apple uses Google cloud for iCloud.
HUYEN: DTNS is made possible by you the listener. Thanks to Tim Deputy Brandon Brooks Jony Hernandez
[[BREAK]]
[[BRIEFS]]
TOM: There’s more we need to know today, let’s get to the briefs.
Google announces Pixel 10a with completely flat camera Google Pixel 10a: A phone with more in store, in store soon
HUYEN: Google launched a teaser for the Pixel 10a showing off the form factor and announcing preorders will start February 18th. The biggest design change from the flagship 10 is that, once again for the A version, the dual-camera system is now flush with the rear instead of having a camera bump. No pricing or other details were announced.
AI Won’t Kill the Software Business, Just Its Growth Story Steven Sinofsky on X: “Death of Software. Nah.” Arm CEO says AI software sell-off is ‘micro-hysteria’ Shares of Arm plunge amid concerns over smartphone chips Arm Holdings shares fall as licensing sales miss estimates Qualcomm, Arm bear brunt of memory shortage as smartphone chip sales disappoint
TOM: Software company stocks have been declining for the past few months as investors worry that LLMs will eliminate the need for software. This, while some of the same investors are worrying that we’re in a bubble and LLM companies are going to go bust. The latest scare came from Anthropic’s Claude Cowork, which can automate some contract reviews and legal briefings.
Meanwhile software companies are facing headwinds from declining corporate spending that doesn’t directly relate to using LLMs to replace software.
A few hardware CEOs do not think it makes sense.
NVIDIA Chief Executive Jensen Huang said on stage at Cisco Live on Tuesday. “It is the most illogical thing in the world, and time will prove itself.”
Arm boss Rene Haas called it “micro-hysteria” and added “As I look at enterprise AI deployment, we aren’t anywhere close to where it can be.”
Arm is an odd place, as evidenced in its latest earnings, as it faces big revenue gains from data centers using its chip designs, but declines from smartphones, which are expected to struggle to sell as component prices, like RAM, rise in response to that same data center demand. Qualcomm has the same dilemma. Both companies posted strong revenue growth but missed expectations for their forecast.
Steam Machine and Steam Frame delays are the latest product of the RAM crisis Valve’s Steam Machine has been delayed, and the RAM crisis will impact pricing
HUYEN: Motang posted this one to our subreddit. Valve announced that it still is not ready to announce the price or availability of the forthcoming Steam Machine desktop PC and Steam Frame VR headset. It still plans to launch both in the first half of the year, pushing out the latest date to June 30. It all comes down to RAM. Valve said in a blog post, “When we announced these products in November, we planned on being able to share specific pricing and launch dates by now. But the memory and storage shortages you’ve likely heard about across the industry have rapidly increased since then. The limited availability and growing prices of these critical components mean we must revisit our exact shipping schedule and pricing (especially around Steam Machine and Steam Frame).”
Researchers debunk TikTok censorship claims about ICE and Epstein
TOM: Shortly after TikTok spun out its US data center and algorithm operations into TikTok USDS, a data center outage caused problems in how videos were served and created. This led people to jump to conclusions that new ownership is censoring feeds.
Oracle had been running the servers for TikTok USDS for years. The main things that changed were retraining the algorithm for US users and the ownership being split in a different way.
But many people pointed to videos disappearing about content they found important.
So Good Authority, funded by the Carnegie Corporation, the Democracy Fund, and Vanderbilt University, published an analysis from eight academics to see if they could find evidence that any particular kind of content was hard to find during the data center outage.
They used viewership metrics from more than 100,000 videos and compared them between 5 political topics and other non-political topics. Posts about all the topics dropped to almost zero during the outage, and all began to recover at the same pace.
[[PROMO]]
TOM: Want honest reviews from people who actually bought and live with tech? You need LIVE WITH IT! Sarah Lane hosts a weekly look at the tech she and others have spent months living with because they needed it. This week our own editor Hammond, shares one of the tools he loves, called the TourBox. Listen to Live With it wherever fine podcasts are traded or watch at youtube.com/dailytechnewsshow
[[BREAK]]
TOM: And now, some quick headlines that are just good to know and might make you look smarter in the future.
Japan’s Sony says profit jumped 11% in last quarter, raises its forecasts Sony’s holiday PS5 sales dropped 16 percent compared to last year
HUYEN: During its largely positive earnings report, Sony said it has shipped 92.2 million PlayStation 5 consoles, though shipments in the most recent quarter were down 16% on the year. The PS5 is heading into its 6th year since launch.
Newsletter platform Substack notifies users of data breach
TOM: Substack told users it discovered on February 3rd, that attackers accessed user email addresses and phone numbers in October, and warned that the information could be used in phishing attempts.
Nvidia won’t release new gaming GPU for ‘first year in three decades’ due to RAM shortage
HUYEN: The Information’s sources say that for the first time since the 1990s, NVIDIA will go this year without releasing a new consumer GPU, and will also reduce production of the current RTX 50-series cards as well.
OpenAI launches Frontier in bid to win more business customers
TOM: OpenAI annocuned a new product for enterprise companies called Frontier, which makes it easier to build, deploy, and manage agents in a corporate setting.
Kyiv Says Russian Military Has Lost Access to Musk’s Starlink
HUYEN: Ukraine’s defense minister says SpaceX has shut down unauthorized Starlink terminals being used by the Russian Military, and published instructions for registering authorized terminals to be used by the Ukrainian Military.
A potential Starlink competitor just got FCC clearance to launch 4,000 satellites
TOM: The US FCC has cleared Logos Space Services to launch more than 4,000 broadband satellites into low Earth orbit by 2035 to create its space-based internet service.
HUYEN: Spotify is partnering with indie book-selling platform Bookshop.org to let Spotify Premium subscribers buy physical books through the Spotify app.
Overwatch will drop the ‘2’ as Jetpack Cat and four other heroes arrive on February 10
TOM: With its February 10th update, Overwatch 2 will become called just Overwatch.
Snap Sees Daily Users Dip But Q4 Profits Rise
HUYEN: Snap’s daily Snapchat users fell by 3 million to 474 million last quarter but net income rose from 9.1 million a year ago to 45.2 million.
TSMC Plans Cutting-Edge Chips in Japan in Win for Takaichi
TOM: TSMC plans to make some of its most advanced 3-nanometer process chips at its plant in southern Japan, at a factory previously planned for 7-nanometer production.
Galaxy S26 series will not have built-in Qi2 magnets
HUYEN: Leaker Ice Universe claims that the forthcoming Galaxy S26 Ultra will not have built-in Qi2 magnets, forcing users to continue to rely on the case.
Meet Gizmo: A TikTok for interactive, vibe-coded mini apps
TOM: And following on the heels of Moltbook, a social network for agentic models, is Gizmo a TikTok-like feed of vibe-coded mini apps. Just type what you want it to do, and it will create an interactive experience like a puzzle or small game. Available on Android and iOS.
[[HELPING EACH OTHER UNDERSTAND]]
HUYEN: We end every episode of DTNS with some shared perspectives. Today sTim is back with an on-the-scene account of 8K
TOM: sTim writes: I’ve only seen 8k once, but it was incredible. Now admittedly, it was on U2’s “Joshua Tree 30th anniversary’ tour, and said 8k screen was the entire LENGTH of the end zone in a football stadium (200 feet (61 m) wide by 45 feet (14 m) high) and a “slight curve” to make things look even more like 3D, but it was unreal. One song was accompanied by drone footage flying through a forest, and when the drone banked to make a turn, I noticed the footage was so immersive and real that I found myself leaning along with it! Also some of just the deepest colours I’ve ever seen on screen. Probably not room for a screen that size in my living room anytime soon, but it has me holding out hope for what 8k could do at smaller sizes someday.
[[DISCUSS]]
HUYEN: What are you thinking about? Got some insight into a story? Share it with us feedback@dailytechnewsshow.com
TOM: Thanks to sTim for contributing to today’s show. And thank YOU for being along for Daily Tech News Show. You can keep us in business, by becoming a patron, atPatreon.com/dtns
