Nvidia, the Guarantor Behind the GPU
Nvidia neocloud financing now reaches beyond chip purchases: the company disclosed $3.5B in land, power and facility lease guarantees, then reportedly offered to rent young providers’ unused GPUs for a share of revenue.
Chegg's 388-Role Plan and the Free-Answer Trap
Chegg had 3.7 million subscribers during the remote-learning surge of 2020 and 3.2 million in Q1 2025, when subscribers were falling 31% year over year. Chatbots and search summaries now challenge both the answer students bought and the route they took to find it.
Google’s 3,590-MW Constellation Deal Faces a Grid Test
Google contracted for 3,590 MW from Constellation in PJM, but only about a quarter is described as new nuclear supply. Microsoft’s restart agreement and Amazon’s Maryland expansion deal show how long-term buyers are being paired with distinct kinds of generation investment.
OpenAI releases a range of new mathematical results produced by an internal model, with details like estimations of compute spent in terms of ChatGPT Pro usage
We're releasing a broad range of new mathematical results produced by an internal frontier model.
Mistral launches a preview of Mistral Large 4, or “Le Chonk”, a 1T model it says tops any open model developed in the US or Europe, with weights due October 27
Mistral is launching a public preview of Mistral Large 4, a one-trillion-parameter multimodal model code-named “Le Chonk” …
Sources: Apple's smart home push includes a doorbell, a thermostat, a deadbolt, security cameras, and accessories developed with LG that will carry the LG brand
Apple Inc.'s upcoming push into smart home devices will include a doorbell, thermostat and other accessories developed through an unusual partnership with LG Electronics Inc.
Sources: Broadcom has been working to arrange more than $50B in financing for OpenAI's custom AI chip; Oracle is in talks on financing for a big chip purchase
Apollo, Blackstone and Goldman Sachs among lenders in talks to finance megadeals worth tens of billions of dollars apiece
Google releases Nano Banana 2.1, based on Gemini 3.6 Flash, saying it improves on previous versions “across the board”; pricing is ~50% lower than Nano Banana 2
Google has released Nano Banana 2.1, a new model for image generation and editing.
Anthropic launches Claude Haiku 5.5, the first Haiku model with effort controls, for high-volume, cost-sensitive tasks like summary and classification requests
Introducing Claude Haiku 5.5: the cheapest, fastest, and most capable small model we've ever released. Claude Haiku 5.5 is designed for high-volume, cost-sensitive tasks.
Google DeepMind launches EmbeddingGemma 2, a 740M-parameter model to map code, images, video, and audio in a shared embedding space, under an Apache 2.0 license
EmbeddingGemma 2 is the most capable model for on-device multimodal embeddings, natively mapping combinations of text, images …
Sources: Xbox has secured exclusive game streaming rights for Grand Theft Auto VI; it is not clear how long the agreement will be in place
The streaming rights come in November, when Microsoft is opening up access to Xbox Cloud Gaming. … Xbox CEO Asha Sharma told employees that Microsoft …
Meta, Walmart, Instinct, Shopify, Sierra, Stripe, and others publish the Personal Agent Protocol to standardize and secure how AI bots interact with businesses
A month after Meta's launch of Muse, the personal agent that quickly turned into a viral sensation, a group of companies …
Anthropic expands its Cyber Verification Program by integrating Project Glasswing and offering three tiers, all with access to its most capable Claude models
We're launching a new, expanded version of our Cyber Verification Program (CVP), which makes advanced cyber capabilities …
Microsoft opens preorders for the $2,599+ Surface Laptop Ultra, shipping from October 16, with an RTX Spark and three USB-C ports; one is magnetic like MagSafe
Microsoft has finally given us the all-important pricing and availability details for its flagship Surface Laptop Ultra device, which it first unveiled back in June.
OpenAI rolls out GPT-6 in ChatGPT with Intelligent UI, a new feature that includes graphics and interactive elements like charts, buttons, and forms in answers
Last month we introduced the first GPT-6 models for paid customers and today we're bringing that next generation of intelligence to more people …
A US federal court sentences Michael Smith, who pleaded guilty to using bots to stream AI-generated songs, making $8M+ in royalties, to 18 months in prison
Michael Smith admitted earlier this year to using bots to stream fake songs billions of times in a first-ever criminal case over streaming fraud.
Sources: SpaceX is seeking to raise $40B, including ~$10B in bank loans and ~$30B in investment-grade debt, to purchase Nvidia chips, in a deal led by Apollo
Blockbuster debt deal is the latest sign of the vast spending on chips and other infrastructure underpinning AI
GLM-5.3 has not resulted in any major public cyberattacks despite Anthropic's warnings about its Mythos-level cyber risk, undercutting calls to ban open models
Open-weights, ideology, and acknowledging trade-offs. … Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade.
PS5 modders using AI tools have rapidly installed emulators, as jailbreaks spread across social media; recent games requiring newer firmware are inaccessible
This is fine.png — A game of cat-and-mouse between Sony and hackers is very much underway, as the PS5 has been jailbroken to a massive degree in the past week.
Boston Dynamics appoints former Amazon executive Rohit Prasad, who spent 12 years helping build and expand Alexa, as its CEO, after Robert Playter stepped down
Boston Dynamics appointed former Amazon.com Inc. executive Rohit Prasad as chief executive officer to lead the Hyundai Motor Co.-controlled company into its next era …
Google launches SynthID Detector, which lets users identify AI-generated image, video, and audio from Google, Nvidia, OpenAI, and Kakao across 20 file formats
Google on Tuesday launched a new site that lets anyone verify whether a piece of media, be it an image, a video or an audio clip, is generated using AI.
Xreal opens preorders for its Android XR-powered Aura glasses with a compute puck, starting at $1,279 for 12GB/256GB, in the US, Canada, Japan, and South Korea
The glasses are now available for pre-order. — Xreal has officially launched its Android XR-powered Aura smartglasses …
Common Sense Media calls ChatGPT for Teens an “unacceptable risk”, saying its guardrails fall short of OpenAI's promises and it continues to do kids' homework
ChatGPT's teen-focused experience 'doesn't send alerts to parents when it should,' according to an assessment.
Meta rolls out AI tools to find ads that secretly lead users to CSAM and says it took action against 33.2M pieces of child exploitation content in H1 2026
Meta announced Wednesday that it took action against 33.2 million pieces of child sexual exploitation content on Facebook and Instagram in the first half of 2026.
Elon Musk says Grok Bot going forward will use the “best back-end model for any given task, including Claude Opus 5.5, MidJourney, Suno, and other leading APIs”
Elon Musk announced on Tuesday night that SpaceX's AI unit will now use some AI models from competitors to power Grok Bot, signaling a shift away …
A September 24 cyberattack on Arizona's court system stole 1.3M people's personal info, including 30K orders of protection and 150K foster care board reports
A cyberattack on Arizona's court system stole personal information for more than a million people and is believed to have started …
Sources: the FBI removes an Accenture contractor over a breach exposing thousands of employees' data; the FBI says a contractor failed to apply a security patch
The Federal Bureau of Investigation removed an Accenture contractor on Monday over their role in a damaging data breach …
The AGs of Florida, Iowa, Montana, and Nebraska sue TP-Link, alleging it deceptively marketed its routers' security and didn't properly disclose ties to China
Router maker rejects allegations it misled buyers about protection and its reliance on Chinese suppliers
Spotify expands audiobooks to 180+ markets, bringing its catalog to 750M+ users and offering 350K+ titles in 120+ languages in partnership with 300+ publishers
Spotify announced on Wednesday that it's expanding audiobook access to over 180 markets worldwide, including regions across Europe …
A look at consumer AI trends: ChatGPT has 3x more US subscribers than Claude or Gemini, the top 1% of spenders drive 19.5% of spend, and AI agents gain traction
Three years into tracking consumer AI, the leaderboard is becoming familiar. This is the seventh edition of our Top 100 AI Consumer Apps …
Finland orders Google subsidiary Tuike Finland Oy to halt data center construction in Muhos and Kajaani by October 23, pending environmental impact assessments
Google has been ordered to halt work on two data centers it's developing in Finland, a month after the tech giant committed …
Los Angeles-based Parallel Systems, which makes autonomous electric freight trains, raised a $100M Series C led by AVP, taking its total funding to $200M+
The railroad industry was one of the first to disrupt how the world worked with technology, but lately, innovation in freight railroading has amounted to little more than longer and longer trains.
Sources: Singapore-based data center operator DayOne seeks to raise up to $5B in a US IPO and plans to list its US depositary shares on the Nasdaq by 2026's end
The data-center operator is also backed by Coatue Management, Hillhouse and Citadel — A SoftBank-backed data-center company …
Mistral says it trained ML4 “from scratch” using 3,800 Nvidia Grace Blackwell GPUs in its data centers in Europe and much of its training data was multilingual
Le Chonk — Today, we're launching a public preview of Mistral Large 4. Unofficially ML4, very officially: le Chonk.
Sources: former White House AI adviser Sriram Krishnan is raising a ~$500M fund to back growth- and later-stage US AI startups, prioritizing national security
Sriram Krishnan, a key AI adviser to President Donald Trump who left the White House in June, is raising an AI-focused venture fund …
Amazon's Ring unveils the $249 Ring Smart Lock, which uses a physical dial to recharge the battery when turned, set for a Q1 2027 launch, and five new cameras
Amazon.com Inc.'s Ring brand unveiled its first smart lock, with an innovative feature that addresses the dreaded scenario of arriving home to a dead battery.
Japan-based chipmaker Rapidus is partnering with 17 companies, including US-based Synopsys, to help customers design chips; Rapidus has $15B+ in state funding
Japan's Rapidus, with $15 billion in state backing, is tying up with chip design firms as it seeks to answer a major question hanging …
Healthleap, which makes AI screening software that helps identify patients at risk of undiagnosed illnesses, raised $38M across a $30M Series A and an $8M seed
Healthleap, a startup building an AI platform that reads patient records to identify patients at risk of undiagnosed illnesses …
The DOD offers chipmaker Wolfspeed, which filed for bankruptcy in 2025, a conditional loan of up to $1.5B in exchange for warrants for up to 7.5% of the company
The US Defense Department pledged to issue a conditional loan to Wolfspeed Inc., the chipmaker that filed for bankruptcy last year …
A Taiwan union representing Micron workers says it has secured member authorization to strike over the company's bonus scheme; the details are under discussion
A Taiwan union representing workers at Micron Technology (MU.O) said on Wednesday it had secured authorisation from its members …
Turba Labs, which develops tech for optimizing AI infrastructure using digital twins of data centers, emerges from stealth with a nearly $52M seed and Series A
The data center build-out is exploding across America. But what if AI didn't need more—more chips, more energy, more resources …
Anduril lands an up to $2.9B US Navy contract to make Virginia-class submarine components, days after Palmer Luckey was named to a DOD future weapons task force
Sources: Nvidia-backed neocloud Lambda is raising up to $4B led by Blackstone and Coatue at a $14.5B pre-money valuation in a final round before its planned IPO
Blackstone and Coatue are leading the round, which values the cloud-computing startup at $14.5 billion pre-money
Capitolis, which develops tech for banks and financial institutions, raised $220M, including a $120M Series E at a $1.9B valuation, up from $1.6B in March 2022
Citi, Bank of America, Nomura, Tradeweb, J.P. Morgan, UBS and other major financial institutions are backing the fintech …
Uber agrees to acquire Boston-based catering platform ezCater for $2.3B in cash to help Uber Eats reach corporate clients; the deal is set to close in months
Sources: Dallas-based Disruptive is targeting up to $10B for a late-stage fund and has secured $7.5B; founded in 2012, it has backed Groq and Reflection AI
Winning bets on hot AI startups are propelling a little-known Dallas firm into a small group of firms raising gigantic funds
Los Angeles-based game studio Gardens Interactive raised a $35M+ Series B led by Lightspeed at a $190M pre-money valuation, taking its total funding to $71M
A studio led by the makers of the hit titles Sky: Children of the Light and Journey has raised $35 million in new funding to upend the viral …
GoTo and Grab face pressure to offer drivers better deals; GoTo's share price has fallen 90%+ from its 2022 peak, while Grab's has fallen 50%+ in the past year
Asia's market leaders Grab and GoTo face squeezed margins over push to offer better deal to workers
Anthropic expands its Claude Startups program with $45K in discounts and credits via the Claude Startup Stack, a $1,000 API credit, and a year of Claude Team
Sources: the European Commission considers taxing big US tech companies through a broad levy on large corporations to avoid singling out individual companies
European Commission considers a broad levy on all large companies to avoid singling out US digital services groups
Google contracts for 3,590 MW of power from Constellation Energy in the US' largest power grid, with new nuclear energy accounting for ~25% of that supply
Ofcom opens an OSA investigation into Meta over Instagram Instants in the UK; Meta says it “briefed Ofcom about this feature” several times before its May debut
NYC-based Melius, which provides AI tools for generating ad campaigns, images, and videos, raised $25M, including a $20M Series A led by CRV and a $5M seed
Melius, an AI platform for generating ad campaigns, images, and videos, announced on Tuesday that it raised a total of $25 million in funding …
Flai, which makes AI tools for car dealerships to manage phone calls, emails, and texts, raised a $27M Series A led by Base10 Partners
When Flai was raising its seed round last year, it was just a team of three people pounding the pavement to get car dealerships to use the startup's software …
Google launches Playground, a no-code web platform for making games using AI prompts, available to US users aged 18+, powered by Gemini, Nano Banana, and Lyria
AI startup acquisitions by other AI startups hit 195 through September 29, up 14% from 2025, but the number of buyers grew just 2%; OpenAI was the most active
Some of the AI industry's fastest-growing startups are becoming serial acquirers, buying smaller companies to fill product gaps …
Stuut, which uses AI agents to automate enterprise order-to-cash cycles and serves 150+ clients, raised a $52.5M Series B led by Insight, for $93M total funding
Artificial intelligence companies that can help even bigger companies to get paid are likely to make a fair bit of money themselves …
Filing: China-based Transsion, which commands 53% of Africa's mobile phone market by unit sales, is seeking to raise as much as ~$428M in a Hong Kong share sale
Shenzhen Transsion Holdings Co., which dominates the market for smartphones in Africa, is seeking to raise as much as HK$3.36 billion …
Meta, Google DeepMind, and Isomorphic Labs invest $300M and the US invests $500M+ in Zuckerberg-backed Biohub to build open biology datasets for AI training
The US government and tech heavyweights Meta Platforms (META.O) and Google parent Alphabet are joining nonprofit Biohub …
Sources: Singapore distances itself from regulating Hyperliquid due to its “decentralized nature”, even as the crypto trading platform confirms it's based there
City-state averse to risk and scandal tries to distance itself from homegrown Hyperliquid Labs and its popular ‘perps’
Navra, founded by SoFi and Figure co-founder Mike Cagney to make on-chain lending and securities markets more accessible, raised a $19M Series A led by Ribbit
ChatGPT is not only using New Yorker cartoonists' style but also adding their signatures to the fake cartoons it generates; one fake went viral on social media
Nous Research, which makes the open-source Hermes AI agent that has hit 22M+ downloads since February, raised $90M at a $1.2B valuation to expand to enterprises
The startup's Hermes tool has been downloaded more than 22 million times since February — Nous Research has raised $90 million …
South Korean officials are probing whether AI agents were used in recent bank hacks, after President Lee Jae Myung said “signs” suggest AI models were involved
Sources: DeepSeek is close to raising $12B+ in a round that could hit ~$14.9B, with Tencent and CATL among the biggest contributors, ahead of an early-2027 IPO
AMD CEO Lisa Su says the company plans to “substantially increase” its supply in 2027 and needs “more advanced wafer capacity”, as she meets Foxconn and TSMC
Sources: Waymo increased the size of its inaugural debt raise from $3B+ to $5B, as it grapples with rising AI costs and rapidly expands its robotaxi fleet
Waymo increased the size of its inaugural debt raise to $5 billion, tapping lenders to help fuel the robotaxi company's growth as it expands globally.
OpenAI says its internal model produced 372 math breakthroughs, nearly all from a single prompt to one AI agent, though some may have taken multiple attempts
OpenAI is now solving unsolved math problems that have been open for decades in a single prompt. — Every field will have similar moments eventually. …Forums:r/technology:OpenAI unleashes hundreds mo...
Anthropic's IPO prospectus: Dario Amodei made $18M in 2025, ranking in the middle of top tech executives, and President Daniela Amodei, his sister, made $16.4M
OpenAI's first report on teen ChatGPT use says teens spend under 15 minutes per day on average on the chatbot, with less than 2% using it for 3+ hours straight
Teens spend under 15 minutes a day on average on ChatGPT, while less than 2% of them interact with the chatbot for over three straight hours …
Artificial Analysis says Mistral Large 4 is the most intelligent model from outside the US and China, achieving results comparable to DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (max)
Mistral has released Mistral Large 4, scoring 38 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index; France is back to having …
Gurman: Apple's upcoming smart home products co-developed with LG are “at least a few more months” away; LG is handling manufacturing and product support
Bloomberg reports that Apple's plans for smart home products include devices, sensors, and cameras codeveloped in partnership with LG.
Study: China is struggling to attract foreign AI talent; for every 30 Chinese AI researchers in the US in 2025, only one in China made the opposite journey
Anthropic cuts Sonnet 5.5 cache read price from $0.20 to $0.10 and adds monthly API credits: $100 for Max 5x, $200 for Max 20x, up to $500 shared by Team users
Carl Franzen /VentureBeat:NEW
At an Australian hearing, OpenAI Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon pledged faster safety incident disclosures; Anthropic representatives made similar pledges
Vinci, which makes software used to simulate elements of chip and other hardware design, raised $250M at a $1.5B valuation led by Advent, Temasek, and Xora
North American startup funding hit $92B in Q3, down 35% QoQ but up 50% YoY, with $61B going to AI startups; there were 11 acquisitions worth $1B+ and few IPOs
Elon Musk says his business empire will build and operate the Texas-based Terafab chipmaking project, quashing speculation about TSMC having an operational role
Debby Wu /Bloomberg:
OpenAI says GPT-6 in ChatGPT's Chat tab is powered by GPT-6 Sol for Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise tiers and GPT-6 Luna for Free and Go tiers
@openai:NEW
Sources: Kuaishou's Kling has picked banks to lead a Hong Kong IPO aiming to raise $1B+ as soon as 2027; Kling hit a ~$15B valuation after raising $2.8B in July
Microsoft opens preorders for the $5,999 Surface RTX Spark Dev Box, with 128GB of unified memory to run local models with 120B+ parameters, shipping in November
Stevie Bonifield /The Verge:
Source: Palmer Luckey's Erebor hits $7B+ in deposits since launching in February, including $3B+ in deposits and 500+ new customers over the past quarter
Anthropic prices Haiku 5.5 at $0.10/1M input and $0.50/1M output tokens for requests up to 100K tokens, and $0.50 and $2.50 above, vs. $1 and $5 for Haiku 4.5
Frederic Lardinois /The New Stack:
Anthropic says it found 5,500 verified vulnerabilities in April-October and Glasswing partners found 129K+ in April-July; 33K+ were critical or high severity
Anthropic is expanding a program that allows vetted cybersecurity professionals to test its most powerful AI models with fewer safeguards …
Xreal's Aura and Meta's VR Glasses hands-on: both have a compute puck and are light, but Aura's arrive in 2026 and have passthrough lenses suitable for walking
Boone Ashworth /Wired: