The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

• Sandisk reports Q1 revenue up 378% YoY to $11B, vs. $10.7B est., forecasts Q2 revenue above est., announces an 8-for-1 stock split; SNDK drops 4%+ after hours (MarketWatch) [8d]
• Pinterest reports Q3 revenue up 12% YoY to $1.17B, vs. $1.21B est., global MAUs up 10% to 661M, and forecasts Q4 revenue below est.; PINS drops 8%+ after hours (Liz Moyer/Barron's Online) [8d]
• Polymarket resumes trading after a security incident with a third-party provider, which a source says is DebugBear, and says it will reimburse affected traders (Reuters) [8d]
• Sources: Nvidia is in talks to provide Nscale with billions of dollars in credit guarantees for debt to develop a 460MW data center that Anthropic plans to use (Phoebe Liu/The Information) [8d]
• Binance says it is investigating a "potential security issue" as suspicious outflows reach up to $5.8B; Tether freezes 1.5B+ USDT, Circle freezes 800M+ USDC (The Block) [8d]
• Coinbase reports Q3 revenue down 35% YoY to $1.22B, in line with est., and net income up 66% to $719M, its first profit in a year, on unrealized crypto gains (Olga Kharif/Bloomberg) [8d]
• Roblox reports Q3 bookings down 12% YoY to $1.7B, vs. $1.63B est., and DAUs down 9% to 138M, vs. 145.8M est.; RBLX drops 16%+ after hours (Cecilia D'Anastasio/Bloomberg) [8d]
• Sources: Instagram is offering select creators $50K to $500K to cross-post their long-form YouTube content to its new "Features" product (Business Insider) [8d]
• Amazon reports Q3 AWS revenue up 39% YoY to $45.98B, above $45.29B est., and AWS operating income up 55% to $17.77B, above $16.97B est. (Jordan Novet/CNBC) [8d]
• Sources: Google, Meta, and other tech companies are resisting broad ICE user data demands as they face potential Democratic-led congressional investigations (Wall Street Journal) [8d]
• Symbotic says Walmart has committed an additional $6B over several years to deploy Symbotic's supply-chain automation technology across its distribution network (Sanskriti Shekhar/Reuters) [8d]
• Reddit reports Q3 revenue up 53% YoY to $895M, vs. $878M est., DAUq up 12% to 130.3M, below est., forecasts Q4 revenue below est.; RDDT drops 9%+ after hours (Jonathan Vanian/CNBC) [8d]
• Amazon spent $77B+ on property and equipment in Q3, leading to a free cash outflow of $42.4B; Amazon said in July that it would likely spend $220B in 2026 capex (Matt Day/Bloomberg) [8d]
• Intel reports Q3 revenue up 21% YoY to $16.5B, vs. $16.5B est., and forecasts Q4 revenue and adjusted EPS below estimates; INTC drops 16%+ after hours (Katie Tarasov/CNBC) [8d]
• Reddit plans to require users to log in to fully access the site in response to AI scraping and will test it in select markets outside the US this quarter (Sara Fischer/Axios) [8d]
• Amazon reports Q3 ad revenue up 11% YoY to $19.64B, vs. $20.82B est., and subscription services revenue up 11% YoY to $14B (Annie Palmer/CNBC) [8d]
• Amazon reports Q3 revenue up 12% YoY to $201.9B, net income down 2% to $20.7B, and operating income up 61% to $28.1B; AMZN drops 8%+ after hours (Amazon) [8d]
• Source: Anthropic is "Customer B" cited by SpaceX in a filing as its single largest customer accounting for 34.5% of Q3 revenue, surpassing the US government (Bloomberg) [8d]
• Sources: an Accenture staffer's Claude agent ran on a DOD network for two months and appears to have sent info to a third-party site before it was identified (Vittoria Elliott/Wired) [8d]
• Utah files 14 criminal charges against Kalshi and its co-founders Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara for allegedly breaking Utah's gambling laws (Andy Larsen/Salt Lake Tribune) [8d]
• OpenAI updates Model Spec to reorganize it around five values: faithfulness to human intent, harm minimization, honesty and transparency, human agency, and care (OpenAI) [8d]
• SuperMe, which generates AI-powered chats with simulated profiles of prominent industry experts to let users ask questions, raised $20M (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch) [8d]
• Source: Dulo, a startup co-founded by Google veteran Sebastian Thrun to build "foundation models for hardware design", raised a $130M seed (Rocket Drew/The Information) [8d]
• Alphabet discloses $1T+ in purchase commitments, future leases, and other obligations; its Q3 filing shows $98.5B in contingent commitments, up ~$23B from Q2 (Davey Alba/Bloomberg) [8d]
• Alphabet's stock falls 12%+, wiping a record $500B from its market cap, after reporting negative cash flow amid its AI spending; the Nasdaq falls 1.4%+ (Stephen Morris/Financial Times) [8d]
• Airbnb spent $12.6M+ since 2025 to become a top LA political contributor, backing Mayor Karen Bass and pushing for friendlier rules ahead of the 2028 Olympics (Liam Dillon/Politico) [8d]
• Canada-based Cohere completes the first close of a round that it expects to total up to $5B, with Canada agreeing to invest up to $1.14B, at a $20.5B valuation (Bloomberg) [8d]
• Sources: Situational Awareness is pitching clients to invest in Fluidstack alongside it in a round that values the neocloud at $40B, up from $18B in September (Bloomberg) [8d]
• The UK FCA, which sued Justin Sun-linked crypto exchange HTX in 2025 for "unlawfully promoting crypto asset services", says HTX will exit the UK in a settlement (Financial Times) [8d]
• Collective, which uses AI to automate bookkeeping for solo business owners, raised a $40M Series B and $60M in nondilutive capital from GC's Customer Value Fund (Natalie Breymeyer/Axios) [8d]
• Ottawa-based Solink, which uses AI to pull data from already-installed security cameras, raised $100M+ led by Vertu Capital, bringing its total raised to $198M+ (Duncan Riley/SiliconANGLE) [8d]
• Thrive Holdings agrees to acquire ADT in an all-cash take-private deal, valuing ADT at ~$7.6B in equity value, a ~46% premium over its October 27 closing price (Claire Rychlewski/Axios) [8d]
• Mistral releases the weights for Mistral Large 4, or Le Chonk, and says it rivals top open models such as GLM-5.3 on the Artificial Analysis Coding Agent Index (Radhika Rajkumar/ZDNET) [8d]
• Serval, which offers AI agents for enterprise IT operations like access management, raised $150M led by Sequoia at a $3B valuation, up from $1B in December 2025 (Harshita Mary Varghese/Reuters) [8d]
• Wabi, which is building an AI assistant that integrates into group chats and can take actions like booking appointments, raised $55M at a $1.25B valuation (Micah Barkley/Bloomberg) [8d]
• Sources: Microsoft is seeking to raise $25B+ in its first US investment-grade bond sale since 2017, when it raised $17B, to fund AI-related capital expenditures (Bloomberg) [8d]
• Q&A with Sam Altman on finding PHP bugs, sandboxing superhuman models as an unsolved safety dilemma, robotics scaling data centers, math, agent swarms, and more (John Collison/Cheeky Pint) [8d]
• Q&A with Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar on diffusing intelligence, safety, AI lessons, forward-deployed engineering, Anthropic vs. the US, AI religion, and more (Ben Thompson/Stratechery) [8d]
• Circuit Mind, which uses AI to automate electronics and circuit design, raised $25M, including an $18.5M Series A led by Norwest, and plans a US relocation (Natalie Breymeyer/Axios) [8d]
• Kalshi raised $1B led by Sequoia and Wellington Management at a $40B valuation, up from a $22B valuation after raising $1B in May, its last raise before an IPO (Lauren McCarthy/New York Times) [8d]
• DoorDash agrees to acquire Instacart in a ~$17B deal, paying $65 per share, a 26% premium to its October 22 close, as the platform delivery market consolidates (Anuja Bharat Mistry/Reuters) [8d]
• Sources: the Pentagon is treating the late August freezer malfunctions across 6+ military bases as a suspected cyberattack and is working with French police (Reuters) [8d]
• Jio Platforms adds $36B in market value in two trading sessions, hitting a $144B market cap, up from its ~$108B IPO valuation, after India's biggest-ever IPO (Ashutosh Joshi/Bloomberg) [8d]
• Sources: DeepSeek and Moonshot AI heavily relied on GPT-6 Astra distillation to train models like Kimi K3.1 Pro and V4.1-Flash 1017, after Anthropic's crackdown (The Information) [8d]
• Epic Games says it is using AI tools to "develop code and features" for Unreal Engine, including core engine components like the D3D12 rendering layer (Jamie Hore/This Week in Videogames) [8d]
• Sierra Club expects US power emissions to hit 2.1B metric tons by 2030, up 42% on 2025 and erasing 15 years of cuts, with off-grid data centers matching Mexico (Bloomberg) [8d]
• Vladimir Putin praises Elon Musk as a "real genius" and says Russia is in "close contact" with Musk and the US to coordinate Rassvet and Starlink satellites (Kali Hays/BBC) [8d]
• Apple's touchscreen MacBook Pro is designed for the iPad generation, with an optimized macOS, and the company is right to move on from Steve Jobs' skepticism (Federico Viticci/MacStories) [8d]
• US officials believe Megaspeed executive Alice Huang is a Chinese asset who maintained a close relationship with Jensen Huang to pass intelligence to Beijing (New York Times) [8d]
• Sources: Bloomberg, Susquehanna, and Jump Trading signed up for Truth Social's fast API feed of President Trump's posts, paying $60K to $100K per month (Reuters) [8d]
• A profile of Nscale CEO Josh Payne, who is proceeding with plans for a US IPO that sources say, is targeting a $30B valuation despite some investor pushback (Mark Bergen/Bloomberg) [8d]
• How Maynard v. Snapchat, a 2016 lawsuit linked to a car crash involving Snapchat's speed filter, sparked social media's legal reckoning over user safety (Olivia Carville/Bloomberg) [8d]
• STMicro reports Q3 revenue up 17.9% YoY to $3.76B, operating income up 98% YoY to $429M, vs. $400.5M est., and forecasts $4.15B in Q4 revenue, vs. $4.10B est. (Reuters) [8d]
• A profile of Tencent Cloud CEO Dowson Tong, who is shifting Tencent's AI focus toward businesses and betting on its Claude Cowork-style assistant WorkBuddy (Bloomberg) [8d]
• Bluesky blocks links to a leaked archive containing personal data of 41,000+ DHS employees and contractors, saying it was "shared without their authorization" (Wired) [8d]
• National Student Clearinghouse: US computer science enrollment fell 12%+ for undergrads and 10%+ for grad students this fall, as AI reduces coding jobs (Elizabeth Rembert/Bloomberg) [8d]
• Google announces the expansion of ads in AI Mode into international markets, as growth in its core search advertising business slows (Lauren Forristal/TechCrunch) [8d]
• Samsung shares fall as much as 6.6% as a lack of a new shareholder return plan, higher capex, and its chip unit's profit miss weigh on investor sentiment (Bloomberg) [8d]
• Samsung expects capex to rise ~60% to ~$63B this year, with HBM capacity sold out through 2027 and 10 long-term supply deals secured with key customers (Bloomberg) [8d]
• Google's search revenue rose 12% YoY to $63.25B in Q3 2026, down from 14.5% in Q3 2025, with Google attributing the slowdown to "lower monetization" in AI Mode (Simon Sharwood/The Register) [8d]
• DoorDash moves its Q3 earnings release from November 4 to before the market opens on October 29, amid reports of an imminent ~$17B deal to acquire Instacart (Ville Heiskanen/Bloomberg) [8d]
• Fragment, which uses AI to resolve purchasing and payment issues across manufacturing datasets, emerges from stealth with $56M from 8VC and others (Chris Metinko/Axios) [8d]
• How surging demand from AI hyperscalers has quintupled flash memory prices and shifted market and negotiating power from Apple to suppliers like Kioxia (Rolfe Winkler/Wall Street Journal) [8d]
• Samsung reports Q3 revenue up 127% YoY to a record ~$146.3B and a record operating profit up 783% to ~$80.5B, both roughly in line with estimates (Jenny Lee/CNBC) [8d]
• Google is rolling out Gemini 4 Carbon to selected cybersecurity defenders through Fairwind at $2/1M input and $10/1M output tokens, rising to $4 and $20 later (Carl Franzen/VentureBeat) [8d]
• The personal data of 41,000+ DHS employees and contractors, including CBP and ICE agents, leaks online after hackers claim they breached DHS' Okta login system (Wired) [8d]
• Microsoft reports Q1 Xbox hardware revenue down 14% YoY, Xbox content and services revenue down 2%, and Windows OEM and Devices revenue down 22% (Tom Warren/The Verge) [9d]
• Zillow agrees to pay $212.5M to settle an investor class action over its failed Zillow Offers home-flipping venture, after SCOTUS refused to hear its appeal (Jonathan Stempel/Reuters) [9d]
• Sources: AI coding startup Cognition weighs a new funding round before year's end after receiving offers valuing it at $70B-$80B, up from $48B in September (Katie Roof/Business Insider) [9d]