Razorpay on February 17 announced a strategic partnership with global artificial intelligence coding firm Replit to power payments for Indian users and enable developers to monetize AI-built applications using local payment methods.

Developers can integrate UPI and card payments into Replit apps. Integration allows seamless monetisation for Indian AI builders.

The partnership aims to address this gap by enabling seamless rupee payments for subscriptions and embedding local payment methods into AI-built applications.

“What’s exciting about Razorpay is how forward-looking they are with AI. They already have a product around agentic payments,” Replit chief executive officer Amjad Masad.

“Developers are increasingly building conversational AI and they should be able to integrate payments in a much more seamless way. Payments are going to be deeply integrated into the agentic AI layer.”

Source: Money Control

Three companies make essentially all hard drives on earth: Western Digital (42% market share), Seagate (40%), and Toshiba (18%). When WD CEO Irving Tan says they're "pretty much sold out for calendar 2026" with "firm purchase orders from top seven customers" and long-term agreements extending to 2028, he's describing nearly half the global supply being locked up.

Lead times for enterprise nearline drives have gone from a few weeks to over 52 weeks. HDD average selling prices are at their highest point since 1998. And this is happening despite total exabyte shipments hitting records: WD alone shipped 215 EB in the most recent quarter, up 22% year over year. The drives are moving faster than ever and still can't keep up.

Why now? Hyperscaler capital expenditure for 2026 is approaching $700 billion. Amazon announced $200 billion in capex, the largest single-company infrastructure spend in history. Google guided $175-185B (up 140% from 2025). Meta guided $115-135B. About 75% of all of this goes to AI infrastructure: GPUs, servers, and the storage to feed them.

SSDs can't absorb the overflow. Enterprise SSD prices (30TB TLC drives) surged 257% in nine months, from about $3,000 to nearly $11,000. HDDs went up only 35% in the same period. The cost ratio between SSDs and HDDs per terabyte widened from 6.2x to 16.4x. Micron's 2026 enterprise NAND supply is already "fully committed." So even companies that would prefer SSDs are buying hard drives because that's what's available at a price that doesn't break the budget.

The technology bottleneck compounds this. Seagate is the only company shipping HAMR (heat-assisted magnetic recording) drives right now, their Mozaic 3 platform at 30TB per drive. The next step, 40TB drives using Mozaic 4 , starts volume production in the first half of 2026. Western Digital delayed its HAMR entry to the second half of 2026, citing prohibitive per-unit costs at low volume. HAMR requires a fundamentally different manufacturing process: iron-platinum media, glass substrates instead of aluminum, and a near-field transducer laser integrated into every read/write head. You can't just flip a switch and double capacity.

The comparison that keeps coming up is Chia coin in 2021, when cryptocurrency miners panic-bought hard drives and the network storage grew from 600 petabytes to 10 exabytes in a single month. Prices spiked and crashed when the speculation ended. The difference here is that the buyers are Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta, and Oracle, with purchase orders running through 2028, building physical data centers (Meta's Hyperion project in Louisiana: 5 GW capacity, $27 billion; the Stargate project in Texas: 7 GW planned, $400 billion ). This isn't speculative hoarding. The demand is structural, funded by $121 billion in new debt issuance in 2025 alone.

WD saw this coming. They spun off their flash/SSD business into SanDisk Corporation in February 2025, making Western Digital a pure-play hard drive company for the first time. Seagate's FY2025 revenue hit $9.1 billion (up 30%), with net profit jumping from $335 million to $1.47 billion. WD's most recent quarter was $3.02 billion in revenue, with gross margins at 43.9%. These companies are printing money right now.

The overcapacity question is real though. Morgan Stanley and others have warned about an AI infrastructure bubble. Grid interconnection delays average 7 years. The enterprise software sector has lost about $2 trillion in market cap since late January 2026 on fears AI will cannibalize existing products. The Magnificent Six lost over $1.35 trillion in a single week in early February. Everyone agrees AI is transformative. The question is whether $700 billion a year in spending will generate returns before the debt comes due.

If you’re building anything in 2026 and you’re not active on LinkedIn, you’re probably leaving leverage on the table.

For founders especially - LinkedIn isn’t just social media anymore. It’s distribution. It’s hiring. It’s inbound leads. It’s credibility.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth:

Being consistent on LinkedIn is exhausting.

You need ideas.

You need hooks.

You need to comment strategically.

You need to reply fast.

And you need to do it while running an actual company.

So I spent time testing a few SaaS tools that promise to make LinkedIn easier. Here’s what I actually think.

1️⃣ 2PR.io - Surprisingly Good If You Hate Writing

I’ll start with the most interesting one.

2PR.io turns your spoken thoughts into LinkedIn posts. You basically talk, it structures your ideas, and gives you something publish-ready.

At first, I thought it would seem like a publicity stunt. But it's not.

What I liked:

• The articles didn't feel too "AI-polished" to me. (I think there was too much of a good thing.)

• The narrative tone is quite well-preserved.

• The speed is amazing-incredibly so.

For those of us who express ourselves more easily verbally (and most of us do), this approach creates fewer obstacles because it eliminates the need to sit and work on developing hooks for 30 minutes before starting. You express your thoughts and refine them.

It won’t magically make your ideas better - but it will get them out of your head and onto LinkedIn.

If you’re the type who says “I have ideas but I don’t have time to write,” this is probably your tool.

2️⃣ ContentIn - For When You Need Structure

ContentIn feels more like a system than a generator.

It’s clearly designed for solopreneurs and small teams doing their own marketing. You would receive:

• A Framework for planning out content

• Ghostwriting via AI, trained to write like you

• Scheduling

• Management of Posts

This is not about creating a single viral post, but rather, developing content consistency across months.

While using AI is valuable, it does not provide all the value; the real value is in having a structure to your content. By removing the daily burden of "what do I post today", you will find it is much easier to keep creating content over time.

If you are committing to building a personal brand and creating content for an extended period, having a consistent system for creating content is much more important than a single viral post.

3️⃣ Linkmate - The Engagement Multiplier

Most founders obsess over posting.

Few obsess over commenting.

That’s a mistake.

Linkmate focuses entirely on engagement - commenting on relevant posts based on keywords or specific profiles. You can customize tone, control prompts, even automate it.

Now, let’s be clear: if you abuse automation on LinkedIn, people can feel it.

But used carefully? It keeps you visible in conversations you’d otherwise miss.

If your strategy is relationship-driven growth - partnerships, investor visibility, ecosystem presence - consistent commenting is powerful. Linkmate just makes it scalable.

4️⃣ Saywhat - The “All-In” Play

**Saywhat**feels more like a LinkedIn growth ecosystem than a single-purpose tool.

You get all these features together:

• Writing with AI

• Discovering ideas based on successful posts

• Managing comments

• Having analytics

• Being part of a community with like-minded people.

Not many other people realize this, but it is clear that people have faster success when they have other people to grow with!

If you do not post on a regular basis, all these features may be more than what you need. However, if you plan to use LinkedIn as a major way to grow your business, having all the features combined makes sense to streamline your process.

So… Are These Tools Worth It?

Here’s my honest take.

None of these tools will fix weak thinking.

If your insights are generic, AI will just make them sound polished and generic.

But if you already have experience, perspective, or lessons to share - these tools reduce friction. They help with consistency. They remove the blank page problem. They make engagement more systematic.

And for founders, friction is the real enemy.

The real advantage isn’t automation.

It’s staying visible long enough for compounding to kick in.

If LinkedIn is part of your growth strategy, I’d experiment with one of these - not to replace your voice, but to protect your time.

Because attention compounds.

And consistency wins.

If you’re building in public - I’m curious: what’s actually working for you on LinkedIn right now?

No matter how advanced tools or automation frameworks become, understanding software testing basics is still critical for delivering reliable software. These fundamentals give testers and developers a clear framework for identifying defects, validating requirements, and ensuring quality across every release.

Key areas of software testing basics include:

• Requirement Analysis: Understanding what the software is supposed to achieve
• Test Case Design: Writing clear, structured, and repeatable tests
• Testing Levels: Unit, integration, system, and user acceptance testing
• Testing Types: Functional, regression, performance, security, and usability testing
• Defect Management: Logging, tracking, and resolving issues effectively

Focusing on these basics helps teams catch issues early, communicate clearly between QA and development, and build a strong foundation for automation and advanced testing strategies. Mastering software testing basics ensures that every release is more reliable, maintainable, and aligned with user needs.

“India represents one of the world’s most promising opportunities to bring the benefits of responsible AI to vastly more people and enterprises,” said Irina Ghose, Managing Director of India, Anthropic. “Already, it’s home to extraordinary technical talent, digital infrastructure at scale, and a proven track record of using technology to improve people’s lives. That’s exactly the foundation you need to make sure this technology reaches the people who can benefit from it most.”

More than a billion people in India speak one of over a dozen officially recognized languages, but AI models continue to perform better in English than they do in other languages. Six months ago, they launched a company-wide effort to narrow this gap by curating higher-quality, more representative training data in 10 of the most widely spoken languages throughout India: Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Telugu, Tamil, Punjabi, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, and Urdu. This resulted in improvements to their models, and they continue to work on enhancing their fluency.

Source: Anthropic

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Peter Steinberger, who created the AI personal assistant, previously ClawdBot, then MoltBot and now known as OpenClaw, has joined OpenAI.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted on X that in his new role, Steinberger will “drive the next generation of personal agents.” As for OpenClaw, Altman said it will “live in a foundation as an open source project that OpenAI will continue to support”

Source: Peter Steinberger

Anthropic is currently valued at $380 Bn and India's Nifty IT sector combined value is $296.4 Bn

Nifty IT Breakdown:

• TCS – $107.4B
• Infosys – $61.2B
• HCL Tech – $43.6B
• Wipro – $24.8B
• Tech Mahindra – $16.6B
• LTIMindtree – $16.7B
• Persistent – $9.5B
• OFSS – $6.4B
• Coforge – $5B
• Mphasis – $5.2B

From January 2024 to January 2026

• January 2024 : 39.5%
• January 2025 : 24.8%
• January 2026 : 5.9%

Their market share is down from almost 40% in 2024 to below 6% in 2026

India's cabinet has approved projects worth about 1.6 trillion rupees ($18 billion) for infrastructure, urban development and startups, Information Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said on Saturday.

Key highlights:

• New industrial smart cities

• Major expansion in urban transit

• Enhanced funding for deep-tech startups.

Source: Reuters

Alibaba.com India, in collaboration with Startup India (DPIIT), presents the Alibaba.com Global Export Enablement Challenge!

This week, the Indian government’s Startup India initiative announced the collaboration with Alibaba.com to identify and support Indian startups that can help onboard and scale Indian exporters on the group’s global B2B platform. The program offers commissions and technical support to those startups to assist small manufacturers and traders in reaching overseas markets.

India’s export ambitions are closely tied to its small businesses and the platforms they use to reach overseas markets. Micro, small, and medium enterprises account for nearly half of the country’s exports and about 31% of GDP, according to the Indian government’s latest Economic Survey, underlining why New Delhi has focused on expanding digital market access for smaller firms through global B2B channels, including Alibaba.com.

Alibaba.com’s B2B platform connects more than 50 million active buyers across over 200 countries and regions, said Rocky Lu, head of India business at the company.

“Alibaba.com has been active in India for over two decades, and we remain dedicated to our core mission of empowering MSMEs to scale their businesses globally,” Lu told TechCrunch. “Our focus continues to be on leveraging our digital infrastructure to help ‘Made in India’ products reach an international audience through digital transformation.”

Source: TechCrunch

What do you do in the face of uncertainty? Get more certainty.

And probably the best way to do that is to try working on things you're interested in. That will get you more information about how interested you are in them, how good you are at them, and how much scope they offer for ambition.

Don't wait. Don't wait till the end of college to figure out what to work on. Don't even wait for internships during college. You don't necessarily need a job doing x in order to work on x; often you can just start doing it in some form yourself. And since figuring out what to work on is a problem that could take years to solve, the sooner you start, the better.

One useful trick for judging different kinds of work is to look at who your colleagues will be. You'll become like whoever you work with. Do you want to become like these people?

Indeed, the difference in character between different kinds of work is magnified by the fact that everyone else is facing the same decisions as you. If you choose a kind of work mainly for how well it pays, you'll be surrounded by other people who chose it for the same reason, and that will make it even more soul-sucking than it seems from the outside. Whereas if you choose work you're genuinely interested in, you'll be surrounded mostly by other people who are genuinely interested in it, and that will make it extra inspiring.

The other thing you do in the face of uncertainty is to make choices that are uncertainty-proof. The less sure you are about what to do, the more important it is to choose options that give you more options in the future. I call this "staying upwind." If you're unsure whether to major in math or economics, for example, choose math; math is upwind of economics in the sense that it will be easier to switch later from math to economics than from economics to math.