Good morning. As I write this, stocks in Asia are again taking a beating.
Benchmarks in Hong Kong and Taiwan are down 10%, Japan is down 8%, mainland China is down about 6%, and South Korea is down 5%. Shares of the largest tech companies in the region—from Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC to Chinese software giant Tencent to Korean electronics colossus Samsung to Japan’s Nintendo—are substantially down.
Meanwhile futures on the Dow and S&P 500 have tumbled.
This isn’t a markets newsletter, not by a long shot. But it’s clear that President Trump’s move to raise import tariffs across the board has, in short order, turned the global tech sector upside down.
“If the tariffs hikes are maintained,” Morningstar economist Preston Caldwell wrote on Friday, “they will permanently reduce U.S. real GDP and hence real living standards for the average American.”
Today’s tech news below. —Andrew Nusca
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TikTok deal gets another 75-day extension
U.S. President Trump said Friday that he planned to sign an executive order to give his administration more time—an additional 75 days, to be exact—to broker a deal to give the U.S. arm of the social video service a federally approved owner.
The law required that Beijing-based ByteDance find a new owner for TikTok’s U.S. operation by Jan. 19 or be banned on national security grounds.
When Trump took office, he signed an order—one made in violation of the law, legal experts note—to suspend enforcement of the ban by 75 days to give him time to negotiate an agreement. This extension would double that timeline.
As an array of suitors makes moves—ByteDance has confirmed only that it was in talks with the U.S. government—questions remain: How much will ByteDance own in a new venture? How much, if any, will the U.S. government own?
And: Who will control TikTok’s coveted algorithm?
Whatever deal transpires, it must be approved by both the American and Chinese governments. —AN
Apple price hikes may be on the horizon
Will Apple raise its prices?
With the company caught in the middle of the U.S.-China trade war—now a global trade crisis—it’s not an unfair question.
Apple’s products are assembled in China, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam. Almost overnight, U.S. import tariffs on those countries jumped to between 20% and 54%.
Bloomberg’s Apple-watcher Mark Gurman notes that Apple will likely take several steps to mitigate the pain.
First, the company could absorb some of the costs itself. Second, it could pressure suppliers to reduce prices. Third, it could make additional supply chain adjustments, such as moving more product through Brazil (10% tariff), where its supplier has facilities.
And fourth, yes, it could raise prices for its customers.
Apple has not been afraid to raise prices around the world; it quite memorably hiked prices in the U.K. after Brexit, for example.
But as Gurman notes, the starting price in the U.S. for its flagship iPhone model—presently the 16 Pro—has been $999 for eight years. Adding another digit? Well, that may be too much to bear. —AN
Meta debuts ‘multimodal’ Llama 4 AI models
The parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp has released what it says is one of the world’s most advanced artificial intelligence models.
Meta’s new Llama 4 models promise to be “multimodal,” meaning they can work with different kinds of media, not just text.
At the center of the new AI family is Llama 4 Behemoth, a large language model that is still training.
Behemoth has two trillion parameters, about 200 billion more than OpenAI’s GPT-4 and substantially more than most AI models regular folks have used. Parameters are the internal “tweaks” that help the models fine-tune their responses.
Two members of the Llama 4 herd, dubbed Maverick and Scout, are available now to developers and users of Meta’s apps.
Meta claims its latest Llamas outperform models from Anthropic, Google, Mistral, and OpenAI, but as I’ve written here before, wait a week and you’ll find similar claims from the others. This ain’t a scene, it’s an arms race. —AN
More tech
—Klarna pauses IPO. Something something market conditions something.
—Google, OpenAI reject U.K. AI copyright plan. The government sought to allow training on public content for commercial purposes without permission unless rights holders opt out.
—Nintendo delays Switch 2 preorders. Launch is still set for June 5…for now.
—Glean is fundraising. The enterprise AI search startup reportedly seeks hundreds of millions at a $7 billion valuation.
—Investors love humanoid robots. More than $7 billion into some 50 startups in the last decade, per PitchBook.
—Ring rounder rejoins Amazon. Jamie Siminoff returns as VP, replacing his successor.
—TikTok’s exploitation problem. Child begging is banned, but evidence is widespread.
—Microsoft debuts AI-generated Quake II. Limited and low resolution…compels me, though.
—OpenAI discussed acquiring io Products. A reported $500 million for Jony Ive and Sam Altman AI-powered device company.
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