Race to AGI Daily Digest - Monday, January 12, 2026

Share:

TLDR

TSMC’s 27% profit jump forecast shows the AI chip boom is still accelerating, lifting hardware names like Intel, ASML, and Broadcom.

TSMC forecasts 27% Q4 profit jump on soaring AI chip demand ->

China’s AGI-Next summit is framing 2026 as the pivot from chatbots to action-taking agents, backed by local AI champions.

China’s AGI-Next summit backs 2026 shift from chatbots to agents ->

Walmart and Google are turning Gemini into a shopping front-end, hinting at assistants that don’t just answer, but transact.

Walmart and Google embed AI shopping inside Gemini assistant ->

xAI’s Grok is running into regional bans over explicit and deepfake content, underscoring how fast policy is reacting to agent-like models.

Grok AI blocked in Malaysia and Indonesia over explicit images ->

The Full Story

Last week closed with NVIDIA’s $20 billion grab for Groq’s talent and tech, plus governments tightening the screws on AI chips and clouds racing to lock in enterprise AI. In short: the AI stack got more specialized, more political, and a lot more expensive. If you want to revisit that arc, the NVIDIA–Groq deal storyline -> is the anchor. We said we’d learn whether that hardware push was a blip or a new baseline. Today’s answer: the hardware gravity is real. TSMC is guiding for a 27% Q4 profit jump off AI chip demand, which is exactly the kind of signal NVIDIA was buying into with Groq. Check the numbers in the TSMC forecast piece ->. Markets followed the story: Intel, ASML, Oracle, and Broadcom all ripped higher, with Intel leading the pack. If you care about who actually builds the compute, keep an eye on Intel ->. Now zoom out from chips to what runs on them. China’s AGI-Next summit is basically declaring 2026 the year we move from chatbots to agents—systems that don’t just chat, but plan, call tools, and take actions. That push is backed by players like Zhipu AI, Moonshot AI, and Alibaba ->; the details are in the AGI-Next summit recap ->. So the frontier contest is shifting from “who has the biggest model?” to “who has the most capable agent tied into real-world systems?” You can already see that in consumer land. Walmart and Google are wiring AI shopping straight into Gemini, so your assistant isn’t just answering questions, it’s driving baskets and checkout flows. That’s a small but real step toward task-centric agents living inside an ecosystem you already use. The Walmart–Google AI shopping story -> and Google’s profile -> show how hard the retail and search incumbents are fighting for this surface. Here’s the thing: as agents get more capable, the social and policy blowback gets louder. xAI’s Grok is now blocked in Malaysia and Indonesia over explicit and deepfake porn content—one story is here: Grok ban coverage ->, and the company profile is here: xAI profile ->. On Hacker News, you have one crowd warning “don’t fall into the anti-AI hype,” while another dives into data poisoning and model abuse in threads like “Poison Fountain.” So for this week, we’re watching three linked themes: the AI hardware race spilling into stock prices and national plans, the shift from chatbots to agents that actually do things for you, and the tug-of-war between open AI access and tighter controls on what these systems can say or generate. If you want to see how the money is lining up behind those themes, the live AI deals graph -> is a good dashboard.

Want more?

Explore 100 AI companies →Track emerging AI trends →View AI deals graph →

Race to AGI Daily Digest - Monday, January 12, 2026

TLDR

The Full Story

Want more?

Get This Delivered Daily