GenAI Daily - January 28, 2026: Apple-Google AI Partnership, Big Tech Earnings Pressure, Enterprise AI Consolidation
Top Story
Apple Officially Partners with Google Gemini for Siri Overhaul
Apple is joining forces with Google to power its artificial intelligence features, including a major Siri upgrade expected later this year. The multiyear partnership will lean on Google's Gemini and cloud technology for future Apple foundational models, according to a joint statement obtained by CNBC's Jim Cramer.
"After careful evaluation, we determined that Google's technology provides the most capable foundation for Apple Foundation Models and we're excited about the innovative new experiences it will unlock for our users," Apple said in a statement Monday.
Bloomberg reported that Apple was planning to pay about $1 billion a year to utilize Google AI. The deal is another major indicator of growing trust in Google's accelerating AI agenda and comeback against OpenAI.
The deal is not exclusive, per a source familiar with the matter.
Apple currently partners with OpenAI to integrate ChatGPT into Siri and Apple Intelligence, specifically for complicated queries that can tap into the AI model's world knowledge. It's unclear what the Google partnership means for the ChatGPT integration in the future. The iPhone maker told CNBC that it isn't making any changes to the agreement.
Why it matters: This partnership signals that even the world's largest tech company is choosing partnerships over internal development for frontier AI models, while potentially reshaping the competitive landscape between Google, OpenAI, and Microsoft in enterprise AI.
Key Developments
Big Tech Faces Earnings Scrutiny as AI Spending Explodes
If 2025 was the year Wall Street came to grips with massive artificial intelligence infrastructure spending from tech's megacaps, 2026 looks to be more of the same. But as the price tag for AI goes up, so do expectations for the returns on investment.
In total, the four so-called hyperscalers — Microsoft, Meta, Alphabet and Amazon — are expected to boost capital expenditures this year to over $470 billion from about $350 billion in 2025, according to analyst estimates compiled by FactSet.
A new market narrative is forming around AI: investors are shifting from pure excitement about capabilities to proof of monetization. Axios framed this as a pivotal earnings stretch for mega-cap tech, with results expected to influence market leadership and sentiment across 2026.
In 2024 and 2025, the market rewarded companies for being early and loud about AI. Now the market wants clarity on where AI shows up in revenue. That includes pricing upgrades, ad conversion lift, higher cloud consumption, enterprise adoption metrics, and customer retention tied to AI features.
(CNBC)
Impact: This earnings season will determine whether AI infrastructure spending continues as a growth story or becomes subject to margin discipline, directly affecting venture funding sentiment and startup exit paths.
Enterprise AI Investment Consolidation Accelerates
According to a survey by TechCrunch on 24 venture capital firms focused on enterprise investment, most investors predict that: 2026 will be a pivotal turning point for enterprise AI investment, shifting from "broad-spectrum" to "focusing on winners." Although overall AI budgets for enterprises are expected to grow, this growth will be highly concentrated.
Andrew Ferguson, Vice President of Databricks Ventures, noted that companies are moving from the "experimental phase" of testing multiple tools for the same use case, to cutting overlapping solutions and focusing resources on AI projects that have been proven effective. "2026 will be the year of integration and screening," he said.
(AI Base)
Impact: Enterprise buyers are shifting from pilot-driven AI experimentation to consolidated vendor relationships, creating clear winners and losers in the enterprise AI market.
Samsung Nears HBM4 Memory Supply Milestone
Samsung is reportedly nearing a major milestone in high-bandwidth memory, with signs it may begin supplying next-generation HBM4 chips soon. The HBM market sits at the center of AI compute because it directly affects accelerator performance and throughput for large-scale training and inference.
SK Hynix has maintained a strong position in advanced HBM supply chains, while Micron has been advancing its own roadmap. If Samsung ramps HBM4 meaningfully, it could diversify supply for Nvidia and shift negotiation leverage, even if demand is so tight that multiple suppliers benefit at once.
Impact: HBM supply diversification could reduce infrastructure bottlenecks for AI deployment while potentially lowering memory costs for cloud providers and enterprises running AI workloads.
Funding & Deals
Cambio Lands $18M Series A for AI-Powered Commercial Real Estate
Cambio, a San Francisco, CA-based AI-native commercial real estate operations platform, has raised $18 million in Series A funding. Founded by Leia de Guzman and Stephanie Grayson, Cambio is an AI-native operations platform designed specifically for the commercial real estate (CRE) industry. Its platform uses agentic AI to ingest building data, evaluate performance, flag retrofit opportunities, and generate capital strategies.
The round was led by Maverick Ventures, with participation from Y Combinator, Adverb Ventures, Peterson Ventures and angel investors including executives from Procore, OpenAI, Anthropic, Vanta, Vercel, ServiceNow, Notion, and Amplitude. Commercial real estate is a $20T industry that spends billions of dollars annually on manual data gathering and investment analysis. Multi-million dollar decisions are still guided by spreadsheets, PDFs, and months of manual review, a process that hasn't fundamentally changed in decades.
Cambio has now raised $22M total, and its latest raise gives it a $100M valuation.
Impact: The funding validates agentic AI applications in traditional industries, demonstrating enterprise appetite for AI systems that can perform multi-step analysis and decision-making workflows.
Ricursive Intelligence Raises $300M Series A at $4B Valuation
Ricursive Intelligence, a Palo Alto-based AI lab spun out of Google DeepMind alumni, announced a $300 million Series A funding round at a $4 billion valuation. The startup is developing a platform that tightly couples AI algorithms with semiconductor design, aiming to automate and accelerate the creation of new chip architectures. Founders Anna Goldie and Azalia Mirhoseini, former Google DeepMind researchers, say their approach creates a "continuous improvement cycle" between AI model development and chip design, potentially breaking current bottlenecks in AI hardware.
The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from DST Global, Nvidia's NVentures, Felicis Ventures, 49 Palms, Radical AI, and Sequoia Capital. This infusion will fund Ricursive's rapid team and product expansion as demand grows for innovative AI chip solutions amid a global semiconductor crunch.
Impact: The massive valuation reflects investor belief that AI-designed chips could break current hardware bottlenecks, while Nvidia's participation signals strategic interest in next-generation chip architectures.
Product Launches
- Miro AI Workflows:
Flows and Sidekicks are now out of beta and part of AI Workflows, available as a paid product on Enterprise plans. Use them to create, save, and share collaborative AI workflows across your organization — like turning your best PM's discovery process or your top designer's workshop format into reusable templates everyone can run.
- Strategy Software Platform Updates:
With the latest MCP integration, connecting any MCP client to your Agent workflows is now effortless. Teams can securely authenticate with OAuth 2.0 and PKCE while maintaining access to the Strategy Library and enterprise data. This unified interface simplifies AI adoption, accelerates cross-platform collaboration, and allows your team to leverage the best AI tools without friction—saving time and boosting productivity.
Tomorrow's Watch List
- Big Tech earnings continue this week with Apple, Meta, Microsoft and Tesla reporting
- Alphabet and Amazon earnings expected next week with AI infrastructure spending guidance
- Samsung HBM4 chip production timeline announcements
- Apple Siri-Gemini integration timeline updates expected in February
Related reading: Check out MIT Technology Review's 10 Breakthrough Technologies 2026 for strategic context on hyperscale data centers, AI companions, and mechanistic interpretability developments.
