CES Day 3

Welcome to the Tech Brew ride home for Wednesday, 01/07/2026. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, XAI has raised another monster round. Polymarket has yet another controversy around whether a bet should pay out or not. Could the AI data center build out actually disrupt politics in local America and a sort of roundup of what's been at CES so far? Here's what you have today in the world of tech. You may have noticed your customers love webinar and video content, but if you've ever actually put together a webinar or video, then you know it can eat up a lot of your time and budget. Now, thankfully, there's a singular tool that can streamline your team's video and webinar workflows, Wistia. Singular tool that can streamline your team's video and webinar workflows, Wistia. Wistia can scale your content output with AI powered tools that help you edit, create, and repurpose videos and webinars fast. And speaking of webinars, you can host engaging, easy to set up webinars in Wistia, too, complete with built in analytics. With Wistia, you don't have to pay for multiple video tools, hop between platforms, or constantly re upload files. You can create, edit, collaborate, and publish all in one place. Head to wistia.com/brew to learn more. That's wistia.com/brew. With Wistia, you can expect less work and more plays. XAI has raised a $20,000,000,000 series e round exceeding its $15,000,000,000 targeted round size with participation from Valor, Nvidia, and others. And the company says Grok five is currently in training, quoting the times. In a statement, XAI said it had sought to raise $15,000,000,000, but ended up getting more from eager investors. Two people with knowledge of the matter said the investment could push XAI's valuation above $230,000,000,000, which it was on track to hit when it was raising $15,000,000,000. That would make XAI founded in 2023 one of the fastest rising companies in value for mister Musk. The company said it would use the funding to, quote, expand its decisive compute advantage as it built data centers to power its technology and to, quote, fuel groundbreaking research. Investors in XAI's latest funding included Fidelity, the Qatar Investment Authority, and Valor Equity Partners, a firm led by mister Musk's friend and former Tesla board member, Antonio Gracias. NVIDIA, the maker of AI chips, also participated. In total, XAI has raised more than $42,000,000,000 according to PitchBook. A new model, GROC five, will be released early this year. XAI has said, mister Musk posted on X in October that the model had a 10% chance of reaching artificial general intelligence, a benchmark that would allow it to perform tasks like a human, end quote. Polymarket is disputing that The US mission to capture Nicolas Maduro constituted a, quote, invasion and are now refusing to pay out bets on a contract with 10 and a half million dollars in wagers that was predicated on the idea of an invasion, quoting the Feet. The decision by the prediction market …