The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

• Seoul-based AI chip startup FuriosaAI raised a $620M Series D at a $2.9B valuation, up from $735M in 2025; South Korea's National Growth Fund contributed $280M (Yoolim Lee/Bloomberg) [9d]
• Sources: the US DOJ has inquired about the impact of Nvidia's Hugging Face deal on AI competition, as antitrust enforcers continue to probe Nvidia's conduct (Reuters) [9d]
• Alphabet reports Q3 negative free cash flow of $9.07B, worse than expected, capex of $51.36B, vs. $55.09B est., and keeps its FY capex forecast at $195B-$205B (Samantha Subin/CNBC) [9d]
• Sources: Marvell is in advanced talks to buy data center optics maker Lumentum, whose market value is ~$83B; the deal could be announced as soon as next week (Bloomberg) [9d]
• eBay reports Q3 revenue up 14% YoY to $3.21B, above $3.12B est., and GMV up 15% to $23.17B, above $22.32B est.; EBAY jumps 4%+ after hours (Kelly Cloonan/Wall Street Journal) [9d]
• Filing: Microsoft recorded $10B in revenue from OpenAI in Q1, nearly 11% of its total quarterly revenue, and has $7.2B in outstanding receivables from OpenAI (Rebecca Bellan/TechCrunch) [9d]
• ServiceNow reports Q3 subscription revenue up 21% YoY to $3.99B, forecasts Q4 current remaining performance obligations below est.; NOW drops 15%+ after hours (Brody Ford/Bloomberg) [9d]
• Microsoft reports Q1 capex of $45.2B, up from $34.9B a year earlier and below its own $50B projection, and free cash flow of $18.6B, vs. $8.54B est. by analysts (Deborah Sophia/Reuters) [9d]
• Alphabet reports Q3 YouTube ad revenue up 9% YoY to $11.2B, below estimates, and Google ad revenue hit $82.01B, up from $74.18B in Q3 2025 (Todd Spangler/Variety) [9d]
• Alphabet reports Q3 revenue up 25% YoY to $127.6B, Google Cloud revenue up 103% YoY to $30.7B, and Google Services revenue up 11% to $96.3B (Alphabet) [9d]
• Microsoft reports Q1 revenue up 19% YoY to $92.3B, Azure revenue up 48% to $33.2B, operating income up 21% to $45.9B, and net income up 32% to $36.6B (Microsoft) [9d]
• Oracle pledges to limit new financing to $20B through FY 2030, expects free cash flow to turn positive in H2 FY 2028 and top $30B in FY 2029; ORCL jumps 11%+ (Deborah Sophia/Reuters) [9d]
• NY Gov. Kathy Hochul signs bills banning AI chatbots from using "unsafe features" for minors and requiring security features in internet-connected baby monitors (Raga Justin/Bloomberg Government) [9d]
• Apple adds a 512GB RAM configuration for the Mac Studio with the M5 Ultra chip, starting at $22,299; the M5 Max model maxes out at 128GB of RAM (Joe Rossignol/MacRumors) [9d]
• Artificial Analysis unveils the Intelligence Index v5 with new coding and science benchmarks; 60% of the Index is based on private test sets or held-out answers (Artificial Analysis) [9d]
• Google and Xreal launch the Xreal Aura wired XR glasses, with Android XR and a puck with Snapdragon Reality Elite, for $1,099+ through December, then $1,279+ (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch) [9d]
• Apple's touchscreen MacBook Pro is the first Mac with the Dynamic Island, offering similar functionality to the iPhone; the Dynamic Island launched in 2022 (Hartley Charlton/MacRumors) [9d]
• Apple says the touchscreen MacBook Pro has a "newly designed hinge" for stability and an "enhanced six-speaker" system; the 14" model is 3lb and the 16" is 4lb (Jay Peters/The Verge) [9d]
• John Ternus says the Mac is "first and foremost an indirect input device", but touch is "comfortable and handy" sometimes; Apple long resisted touchscreen Macs (Steven Levy/Wired) [9d]
• Apple unveils a touchscreen MacBook Pro with a 14" or 16" PROLED XDR display, a light-up Apple logo, Dynamic Island, M5 Pro and M5 Max, for $2,899+ and $3,399+ (Apple) [9d]
• Google unveils Gemini 4 Carbon, its "strongest model with state-of-the-art cybersecurity" capabilities, ranked #1 on Artificial Analysis' new Intelligence Index (Koray Kavukcuoglu/Google) [9d]
• GitHub says it's seeing 7.4B commits per month, up from 2.9B in August, and has added 4M CPU cores and 160PB of storage in 2026 so far to support this growth (Frederic Lardinois/The New Stack) [9d]
• GitHub says Copilot Fusion, which handles model selection and orchestration, is now generally available, releases the GitHub Copilot app, and more (Meredith Shubel/The New Stack) [9d]
• Reddit rolls out a dual-feed homepage, with For You and Following feeds, joining TikTok, Instagram, and others in offering a recommendation-driven feed (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch) [9d]
• OpenAI says it's launching an election "war room" ahead of the US midterms to identify potential spread of misinfo or other efforts to disrupt the elections (Calder McHugh/Politico) [9d]
• Nvidia debuts Nemotron 3.5 Transcribe, an open-weight model for multilingual audio transcription and translation, and Granary v2, its open-source speech dataset (Kyt Dotson/SiliconANGLE) [9d]
• Foundry, a manufacturing-as-a-service startup that builds factories with robots powered by physical AI models, raised a $100M Series A led by Marlinspike (Rocket Drew/The Information) [9d]
• Dropbox plans to cut ~6% of its staff, or ~200 jobs, costing $27M to $33M in severance and related costs, and says CTO Ali Dasdan will step down on November 18 (Anhata Rooprai/Reuters) [9d]
• X adds an intrusive promotional animation of an arm reaching across the screen to direct users to a "promote" post button, targeting verified and Premium users (Andrew Liszewski/The Verge) [9d]
• Chinese PCB maker Dongshan rises on its Hong Kong debut, after raising ~$1.3B in an IPO, below its $3B goal, at a $30B valuation, amid a tricky IPO market (Sangmi Cha/Bloomberg) [9d]
• Amazon Kindle Paperwhite and Kindle Colorsoft review: premium feel, lightweight, nice colors, and snappy performance, but expensive after price increases (Nena Farrell/Wired) [9d]
• Artificial Analysis launches the Intelligence Index v5, with new coding and science benchmarks, built on private datasets; Claude Opus 5.5 (max) leads at 58 (@artificialanlys) [9d]
• Google unveils Google Multi-Party Compute (MPC), a digital-asset custody and security service in private preview, set for commercial availability in early 2027 (Aoyon Ashraf/CoinDesk) [9d]
• Samsung unveils the $229 Galaxy Buds On, its first open-fit, C-shaped cuff earbuds to compete with Sony and Bose, designed with AI's help, shipping November 6 (Chris Welch/Bloomberg) [9d]
• Etsy reports Q3 revenue up 11% YoY to $692.5M, above $668M est., net income of $853.5M after selling Depop, and gross merchandise sales up 9% YoY to $2.65B (Katherine Hamilton/Wall Street Journal) [9d]
• Amazon unveils the $500 Echo Show 16, the $200 Echo Time alarm, and the $200+ Alexa Photo Frame, raises smart speaker prices, and previews Alexa Home Map (Chris Welch/Bloomberg) [9d]
• Meta quietly launched Waddle World, a Tamagotchi-like, AI pet-rearing game, in the Philippines in September, calling it a "daily journal disguised as a pet" (Mariella Moon/Engadget) [9d]
• Chinese AI chipmaker Moore Threads reports Q3 revenue up 1,774% YoY to ~$240M and a ~$7.4M net profit; Moore is building a domestic 100K-GPU cluster with JD.com (Rachel Yeo/Bloomberg) [9d]
• Sources: Anthropic's seven cofounders remain extremely influential and personally tight; Daniela Amodei, who runs operations, is seen as a good balance to Dario (Financial Times) [9d]
• A US federal grand jury indicts OpenAI engineer and Saudi national Abdulrahman "Abdul" Alfozan on a felony charge of interception of oral communications (Sarah Brager/San Francisco Chronicle) [9d]
• AI and cloud cybersecurity startup Upwind Security raised $400M led by Bessemer at a $3.8B valuation, up from $1.5B in January, for $830M in total funding (Marissa Newman/Bloomberg) [9d]
• How the UK's Slough, a town on the borders of west London, became the largest data center hub in Europe, hosting 40+ facilities, as locals seek more benefits (Financial Times) [9d]
• Email: a hacker attack forced the FEC to temporarily take its filing system offline around 10pm ET on Monday, blocking groups from submitting reports (Dawn Kopecki/Reuters) [9d]
• Letter: Senator Elizabeth Warren asks Dario Amodei for "exhaustive responses" to four pages of questions by November 3 regarding existential risks in its S-1 (Corrie Driebusch/Wall Street Journal) [9d]
• Malaysia says it seized ~$12.11M worth of AI chips this month, as authorities close in on a syndicate suspected of smuggling through the country's main airport (Rozanna Latiff/Reuters) [9d]
• Research: professional analysts followed AI agents' randomly assigned "leans" on subjective analytical decisions 86% of the time; 77% used the agents' arguments (Anthropic) [9d]
• Lawsuit: the parents of a 31-year-old say OpenAI's GPT-4o guided her through an aggressive tapering plan off epilepsy meds, leading to her death in February (Teddy Rosenbluth/New York Times) [9d]
• S-1: Anthropic had $112.4B in cash and $19.3B in short-term investments on June 30, surpassing every non-bank US company except Berkshire Hathaway and Alphabet (Leslie Picker/CNBC) [9d]
• How Silicon Valley billionaires raised $333M+ to try to defeat a 5% California wealth tax; Patrick Collison's $33M is his most serious campaign engagement yet (New York Times) [9d]
• The CFTC files a legal challenge to block Utah's attempt to restrict prediction market betting, asserting it is the sole US regulator of prediction markets (Jesse Hamilton/CoinDesk) [9d]
• SK Hynix expects memory shortages to persist through at least 2030; it has long-term deals with 14 major buyers for 50%+ of its output in 2027 and 2028 (Simon Sharwood/The Register) [9d]
• Sources: TPG is in talks to acquire UK-based Ark Data Centres, which operates 27 data centers in the UK and Belgium, from Elliott Management at a ~$5B valuation (Financial Times) [9d]
• Industry insiders say PCBs and chip substrates are key supply constraints for consumer electronics makers as AI demand increasingly eats up production capacity (Nikkei Asia) [9d]
• Sources: CXMT plans to start HBM3E production despite yields of just 20% to 30%; its HBM3E performance is closer to that of SK Hynix's previous-gen HBM3 chips (Reuters) [9d]
• Jio Platforms, India's largest telecom and digital services company, rose 21.4% in its trading debut after raising ~$3.2B in the country's largest IPO (Priyanka Salve/CNBC) [9d]
• Sources: Fujifilm plans to increase magnetic tape production capacity fivefold to meet AI-driven storage demand, its biggest production expansion in ~20 years (Nikkei Asia) [9d]
• Anthropic's S-1 implies a $40T+ annual TAM based on the economic value of knowledge work in 2025, topping SpaceX's $28.5T estimate, without explicitly naming it (Wall Street Journal) [9d]
• Sources: HP, Asus, and Acer are shifting some PC production from Thailand and Vietnam back to China amid rising component costs; Dell is mulling a similar move (Nikkei Asia) [9d]
• The US FCC approves Amazon Leo's $11.5B acquisition of Globalstar, giving Amazon access to Globalstar's 24 satellites and mobile satellite spectrum (David Shepardson/Reuters) [9d]
• Sources: chipmaker Onsemi is in talks to acquire 16-year-old chip startup Ferric for ~$1B; PitchBook: Ferric last raised a $32.1M Series C in December 2024 (Valida Pau/The Information) [9d]
• Letter: two Democratic senators allege the Trump administration withheld a secret FISC ruling on search filters that let analysts access Americans' messages (Dell Cameron/Wired) [9d]
• SK Hynix plans to return $22B+ in dividends and ~$15B in buybacks to shareholders, on top of its ~$30B buyback program completed in August (Kwanwoo Jun/Wall Street Journal) [9d]
• AMD says it will invest $1B in Meta's equity offering, its first Helios rackscale systems are installed at Meta, and its EPYC CPUs power Meta's Muse AI agent (Kai Nicol-Schwarz/CNBC) [9d]
• Toronto-based fintech Wealthsimple raised up to CA$425M led by GIC at a post-money valuation of CA$13.8B, up from CA$10B in 2025 (Reuters) [10d]
• Source: OpenAI, a major Nvidia customer, plans to buy Google's TPUs; a job listing shows it seeks an engineer to "lead the optimization" of its models on TPUs (Ryan Barwick/The Information) [10d]
• An Anthropic hiring manager says he stopped giving coding interviews because Claude is better at them and tells junior engineers that "hunger beats tenure" (Felix Rieseberg) [10d]