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Dec 24, 2025
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Supported by
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Happy Wednesday! The Trump administration delays its Chinese chip tariffs until 2027. The Pentagon will add xAI’s Grok to its AI service for military and civilian employees early next year. ServiceNow plans to acquire cybersecurity startup Armis for $7.75 billion.
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The U.S. will impose new tariffs on Chinese semiconductor imports in June 2027, the Trump administration announced on Tuesday. Those tariffs will stay at zero for the next 18 months, giving American companies a grace period before costs rise. The decision to hold off on imposing the chip tariffs shows how the administration is trying to avoid exacerbating tensions with Beijing, after President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping reached a truce in the trade war earlier this year. After China threatened to restrict exports of rare earth metals, the U.S. moved to ease tensions. As part of the negotiations, the U.S. also postponed other tech export restrictions. The chip tariffs stem from a yearlong investigation known as Section 301 that concluded China has been pouring billions of dollars in state subsidies into
chipmaking plants to dominate the global market for less advanced legacy chips and undercut foreign competitors. While U.S .companies like Nvidia dominate the market for cutting-edge AI chips, China is supplying huge volumes of older chips that power home appliances and cars. For American companies, the 18-month window means they have more time for renegotiating contracts and finding new chip suppliers. The administration is also conducting a broader national security probe that could hit semiconductors from all countries.
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The U.S. Department of Defense will add xAI’s Grok to its artificial intelligence service for military and civilian employees early next year, the department said, alongside models from other AI firms. The service, called genAI.mil, launched earlier this month with only Google’s Gemini model available, with models from OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI listed as coming soon. The Pentagon announced contracts with all four companies worth up to $200 million each over the summer. In a press release late Monday, the Pentagon touted Grok’s “advanced
capabilities” and said that “users will also gain access to real‑time global insights from the X platform.” If the Grok launch is successful, it could help xAI pitch its chatbot to other enterprise customers. The Elon Musk-led company has built an enterprise sales team but has been struggling to win significant business, The Information reported earlier in December.
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The enterprise software firm ServiceNow plans to acquire cybersecurity startup Armis for $7.75 billion, the companies said on Tuesday. The price is a step up in valuation for Armis, which had raised money last month at a $6.1 billion valuation. ServiceNow thinks the deal will help bolster its cybersecurity business and reach more customers who have security concerns about rolling out AI software in the enterprise, CEO Bill McDermott said in an interview. “[Customers] have been pulling us into end-to-end cybersecurity discussions and as the attack surface expands with AI they want more and more from ServiceNow,” McDermott said. “So Armis uniquely positions us to build out this opportunity for security and risk as a part of our core business.” ServiceNow’s
cybersecurity business has roughly $1 billion in annual revenue, and McDermott said Armis has more than $340 million in annual recurring revenue, up from $300 million in August. The deal comes on the heels of several other large acquisitions by ServiceNow, including its $2.85 billion acquisition of Moveworks, which closed last month, and its recently announced plan to acquire the cybersecurity startup Veza for $1 billion.
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Snowflake is in talks to buy app monitoring startup Observe Inc. for around $1 billion, which would likely be the biggest deal in Snowflake’s history, The Information reported Tuesday. Observe, based in San Mateo, Calif., sells so-called observability tools that help developers to understand how their applications are performing and allows them to spot disruptions and outages. The deal would bring Snowflake into closer competition with software firms Datadog and Cisco’s Splunk.
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Motive Technologies, whose software helps companies in industries such as logistics and construction manage their physical operations, grew its revenue by 22% to $327 million in the nine months ended September 30th, the company revealed Tuesday in a securities filing ahead of its planned initial public offering. While that represents a faster top line growth rate than the 19% at which it expanded in all of 2024, the company also lost $139 million in the nine months to September—more than it lost in the same period last year—as its operating expenses rose. Motive, which until 2022 was called KeepTruckin, had roughly 100,000 corporate customers at the end of September. Besides selling subscription software, the company has a comparatively tiny, but growing, segment that provides cards for business expenses and generates its revenue from assessing interchange fees on
those expenses. That segment made up 4% of its top line in the nine months to September. Motive’s backers include Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins and Index Ventures.
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Brett Harrison, the former president of FTX US, has raised $35 million for his startup Architect Financial Technologies, which offers a global perpetual futures exchange. The round, led by Miami International and Tioga Capital, values the company at $187 million, according to a person familiar with the fundraising. The exchange, AX, offers perpetual futures on traditional assets such as stocks and foreign currencies. Perpetual futures, a type of asset popularized by crypto exchanges like FTX, Binance and Hyperliquid, are futures that do not have an expiration date, giving investors leverage without the need to roll over contracts. | | | |
