Billionaire Elon Musk on Wednesday hinted at a possible SpaceX initial public offering in a social media exchange with Ars Technica space journalist Eric Berger, following reports of a possible listing of the rocket maker in 2026.

“As usual, Eric is accurate,” Musk said, in reply to Berger’s post saying “Here’s why I think SpaceX is going public soon,” that linked his Ars Technica article on SpaceX’s plans to go public.

Reuters and others reported on Tuesday that SpaceX was looking to raise more than $25 billion through an IPO in 2026, a move that could boost the rocket-maker’s valuation to more than $1 trillion.

SpaceX did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The California-based company ranks as the world’s second most-valuable private startup after ChatGPT maker OpenAI, according to data from Crunchbase.

SpaceX going public at the reported valuation would represent the second-richest completed IPO in history, after Saudi Aramco’s blockbuster $1.7 trillion listing in 2019.

Reuters earlier reported that SpaceX has started discussions with banks about launching the offering around June or July next year.

OnePlus on Thursday (December 11, 2025) revealed the Ace Edition of OnePlus 15R which will be launched alongside the OnePlus 15R Charcoal Black and Mint Green shades and OnePlus Pad Go 2 on December 17. The OnePlus 15R will come in Electric Violet colour.

The Chinese smartphone maker said, “OnePlus 15R is the ultimate value flagship, and the OnePlus 15R Ace Edition is perfect for those who wish to declare themselves the ultimate Ace gamer.”

The Ace Edition will have a fiberglass back cover with the word Ace inscribed on it.

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OnePlus 15R Ace Edition is going to run the same Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 chipset along with 15R. It will ship with a 7,400 mAh battery.

OnePlus 15R Ace Edition will be launched on Amazon and OnePlus.

Amazon has agreed with Italy’s tax collection agency to pay 510 million euros ($582 million) to settle a tax dispute in the country, two sources close to the matter said on Wednesday.

However, in an unusual development, Milan’s prosecutors are in disagreement with the accord between the revenue agency and the U.S. tech company and plan to continue their investigation, two other sources said.

The prosecutors, who suspect evasion amounting to some 1.2 billion euros related to 2019-2021, expect to wrap up their probe early next year, according to the second two sources familiar with the investigation.

The prosecutors are also conducting two other investigations into the company – one involving alleged tax evasion relating to 2021-2024, and another involving alleged customs and tax fraud involving Chinese imports

Microsoft Chairperson and CEO Satya Nadella announced strategic partnerships with four leading IT companies — Cognizant, Infosys, TCS and Wipro — as they join forces with Microsoft to accelerate the adoption of agentic AI.

On December 11, while addressing an audience of developers and AI experts as part of his AI India tour, at Whitefield in Bengaluru, Mr. Nadella said, “These companies are building deep AI factories.”

“These firms would emerge as ‘frontier firms’ with Microsoft deploying Copilot and agentic AI across their diverse operations. Each of these companies will deploy over 50,000 Microsoft Copilot licences, collectively surpassing 200,000 licences, and setting a new benchmark for enterprise-scale AI adoption.

“By embedding AI into core operations, these organisations are becoming ‘frontier firms’ — not merely adopting AI but redesigning their workflows around human-agent collaboration to deliver high-value outcomes and measurable impact across functions such as delivery, sales, finance, HR, and customer engagement.”

He said that Microsoft was joining hands with the four leading IT companies to deploy Microsoft 365 Copilot and transform the way organisations operate, innovate, and scale. This collaboration was enabling enterprises to enhance productivity, efficiency, and accessibility while driving AI-powered innovation across industries.

With AI at the heart of operations, these firms are setting new benchmarks for productivity, innovation, and enterprise transformation, according to Microsoft.

This announcement comes a day after Microsoft announced its plans to invest $17.5 billion in cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure, skilling and ongoing operations in India over four years, between calendar years 2026 and 2029.

Puneet Chandok, President, Microsoft India & South Asia, said, “These global enterprises are moving beyond experimentation to full-scale deployment, embedding Microsoft Copilot into the fabric of everyday work. This bold adoption is inspiring a new era of enterprise transformation, powered by trusted digital collaborators. The blueprint is being written here — where speed, scale, and impact converge to redefine what’s possible.”

Alphabet’s Google has appointed longtime executive Amin Vahdat as chief technologist for AI infrastructure, Semafor reported on Wednesday, citing an internal memo, as tech giants pour billions into the computing backbone needed to power artificial intelligence.

The move comes as the company ramps up spending on data centres and hardware to support artificial intelligence workloads, with capital expenditures expected to top $90 billion by the end of the year.

“This change establishes AI Infrastructure as a key focus area for the company,” Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said in the memo, according to the report.

Google did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

Tech giants are locked in a high-stakes contest for AI supremacy, where control of compute capacity is emerging as the ultimate differentiator.

Google, which designs its own tensor processing units, or TPUs, is betting that scale and in-house innovation will help it compete in a market where infrastructure is becoming as critical as algorithms.

Microsoft has invested heavily in data centres and partnerships with OpenAI, while Amazon is expanding its custom chip offerings for AWS.

The frenzy underscores how the AI boom is reshaping corporate priorities, with Google CEO Sundar Pichai emphasising “disciplined spending” backed by a $155 billion cloud backlog.

Jeff Bezos’ aerospace firm Blue Origin has been working for over a year on the necessary technology for artificial intelligence data centers in space, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday, citing a person familiar with the matter.

Meanwhile, Musk’s SpaceX plans to use an upgraded version of its Starlink satellites to host AI computing payloads, pitching the technology as part of a share sale that could value the company at $800 billion, the report said, citing people involved in the discussions.

SpaceX and Blue Origin did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Reuters could not immediately verify the report independently.

The concept of orbital data centers has gained traction among tech giants as those on Earth have driven up demand for electricity and water to cool their servers.

Amazon founder Bezos in October predicted that gigawatt-scale data centers would be built in space within the next 10 to 20 years and that continuously available solar energy meant they would eventually outperform those based on Earth.

“We will be able to beat the cost of terrestrial data centers in space in the next couple of decades,” Bezos said at the time. “These giant training clusters … will be better built in space, because we have solar power there, 24/7. There are no clouds and no rain, no weather.”

Last week, Musk had dismissed media reports that SpaceX was raising funds at an $800 billion valuation, calling them inaccurate.

SpaceX is looking to raise more than $25 billion through an initial public offering in 2026, a move that could boost the rocket-maker’s valuation to over $1 trillion, Reuters reported on Tuesday.

Apple CEO Tim Cook met U.S. House members on Wednesday to push back against federal legislation that could require the iPhone maker to authenticate users’ ages and possibly collect sensitive data on children, lobbying instead to put the onus on parents to decide whether to tell app stores about a child’s age.

The bill, called the App Store Accountability Act, is aimed at making sure that minors are not using harmful content online. Texas has already signed a similar bill into law, requiring parental consent to download apps or make in-app purchases for users aged below 18. Utah was the first U.S. state to pass a similar law earlier this year and Australia introduced a nationwide social media ban on under-16s this week.

While the notion of age limits for online content has broad U.S. public support, legislative efforts have kicked off a behind-the-scenes brawl between Apple and Google and tech rivals such as Meta Platforms. Apple and Google, which own the largest app stores in the world, say verifying the age of minors could entail mass collection of children’s birth certificates and other sensitive documents, while Facebook and Instagram owner Meta has argued that requiring app stores to check ages is the only effective way to enforce limits.

Apple, which has long resisted government interference in data privacy matters, has expressed concerns that the federal U.S. legislation would require it to collect identifying information about virtually every Apple user, including children. Cook met House Energy and Commerce Committee members on Capitol Hill on Wednesday to discuss the concerns, Apple said.

“Not all legislative proposals are equally protective of privacy or focused on holding all players in the ecosystem accountable,” Apple’s global head of privacy, Hilary Ware, said in a letter to the committee last week.

“Some well-intended proposals for age verification at the app marketplace level … would require the collection of sensitive information about anyone who wants to download an app, even if it’s an app that simply provides weather updates or sports scores.”

A Pew Research poll in 2023 found that 81% of Americans support requiring parental consent for children to create social media accounts and 71% support age verification before using social media.

Shares in business computing giant Oracle fell more than 10% on Wednesday on word its revenue missed heady expectations, dampening artificial intelligence euphoria in the market.

The slide in after-market trades came despite Texas-based Oracle reporting that net income in the recently-ended quarter nearly doubled to $6.1 billion in revenue, up 14 percent from the same period a year earlier to $16.05 billion.

Oracle’s cloud and business computing unit accounted for $8 billion of that revenue, an increase of 34 percent from the same quarter in 2024, according to the earnings report.

“AI training and selling AI models are very big businesses,” Oracle chief executive Mike Sicilia said in the release.

“We think there is an even larger opportunity – embedding AI in a variety of different products.”

But investors are wary of the massive investments tech companies are making in artificial intelligence models and infrastructure, wondering how and when they will pay off.

Oracle has taken on billions of dollars in debt to pay for AI infrastructure and is reported to be considering borrowing even more.

The company has also announced it is putting significant resources into partnerships with AI chip makers and model builders, such as OpenAI and Meta.

“We are now committed to a policy of chip neutrality where we work closely with all our CPU and GPU suppliers,” Oracle founder and chief technology officer Larry Ellison said in the earnings release.

“There are going to be a lot of changes in AI technology over the next few years, and we must remain agile in response to those changes.”

Oracle shares were down some 10.7% to $199.50 in after-market trades that followed release of the earnings figures.

Instagram has announced a new feature called ‘Your Algorithm’ that will allow users to see and control what they can under the Reels tab. Users will be able to choose from among topics that the platform has found to be interested in, and decide what they want to see more of or even areas that they want to view less Reels of. 

Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram explained that users will find the new ‘Your Algorithm’ tab on the top right and see a brief summary of their interests in Reels. These summaries will be AI-generated and the topics are based on recent user activity. 

The options will include topics like Painting, GRWM, Chess or Horror Movies. 

They will also have the option to share this summary with their followers on the platform. 

The feature is first being rolled out in the U.S. starting today and will be expanded globally soon. 

It was reported a month ago that Instagram had been testing this feature with Mosseri adding that the feature will be eventually for the Explore section too.