The week opened with AT&T closing its $5.75 billion purchase of Lumen's Mass Markets fiber business, a deal that adds more than one million fiber subscribers and four million passings in metros like Denver, Seattle, and Salt Lake City. The strategic message was blunt: the acquired network sits at roughly 25 percent penetration against AT&T's own 40 percent, so the work now shifts from building fiber to selling it. Midweek, Qualcomm posted record fiscal first quarter revenue of $12.3 billion but watched its stock slide as much as 10 percent after warning that a global memory shortage would squeeze the phones its chips go into. And all week, the three national carriers raced to finish one of the largest venue network builds ever attempted, turning Levi's Stadium into a proving ground ahead of Sunday's Super Bowl LX, with the same infrastructure set to serve the World Cup this summer.
TikTok and ByteDance sued the federal government to block the divest-or-ban law, teeing up the biggest First Amendment fight in tech since the encryption wars and putting the fate of a 170-million-user platform in the D.C. Circuit's hands. Apple, meanwhile, shipped the M4 chip in a new iPad Pro — debuting its most AI-ready silicon in a tablet, months before the iPhone would get its own AI story. And Arm Holdings, the company whose designs sit inside virtually every smartphone on earth, beat earnings but spooked the market with soft guidance — a reminder that the AI boom hasn't yet reached the handset chip cycle.
The FCC declared AI-generated voices in robocalls illegal — a unanimous ruling issued weeks after a fake President Biden told New Hampshire voters to stay home, making voice cloning the first AI harm to draw a federal enforcement rule. Google collapsed its confusing AI branding into one name, Gemini, and started charging $19.99 a month for its best model inside a rebranded app. And Arm's shares rocketed nearly 50% on earnings, as investors decided the chip architecture inside virtually every smartphone is also the quiet royalty collector of the AI buildout.