The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

• CesiumAstro, which plans a 737-satellite LEO communications network at two altitudes, raised $730M at a $4.5B+ valuation, bringing its total funding to $1.4B (Loren Grush/Bloomberg) [24m]
• Apple says the App Store has over 100K apps built for the iPhone Duo and "thousands of optimized apps are being added to the store each day" (Jay Peters/The Verge) [1h]
• Crusoe says Google has bought out its data center site in southeast Wyoming; Crusoe reportedly failed to lock in customers including Google for the project (Lynn Doan/Bloomberg) [1h]
• Sources: US intelligence concluded that Megaspeed executive Alice Huang was recruited by China's top spy agency MSS to collect intelligence on Jensen Huang (New York Times) [2h]
• Filing: Google spent roughly $548M to buy around 3M shares of Qualcomm, which is pushing into serving the AI data center market (Ryan Barwick/The Information) [2h]
• Sources: OpenAI has closed on new funding of roughly $11B at a $1.25T valuation; the round could increase to as much as $20B in total (Bloomberg) [3h]
• Sources: Anthropic is continuing with plans to list before the Thanksgiving holiday this month, expecting to raise $80B-$100B at a valuation of $1.25T to $1.75T (Financial Times) [3h]
• AI physics startup PSI says a system running a non-public Anthropic model proved the Aaronson-Ambainis conjecture, a quantum computing question open since 2008 (PSI) [4h]
• Elon Musk says US government contracts will account for under 10% of SpaceX's revenue this quarter, down from 16.6% last quarter and around 20% in 2025 (Bloomberg) [5h]
• Sources: Microsoft has been turning off rented computing capacity from Oracle after declining to renew a 2023 deal, because the hardware used older Nvidia chips (Brody Ford/Bloomberg) [6h]
• The US DOJ indicts three foreign nationals for allegedly using AI to impersonate CEOs and attorneys at major international law firms in a $129M+ fraud scheme (Rebecca Cohen/NBC News) [6h]
• Researcher: *sshole, a decade-old OpenSSH flaw, lets attackers use a password of 256+ characters to log into passwordless accounts on some musl Linux systems (Lawrence Abrams/BleepingComputer) [7h]
• Democrats, with Elizabeth Warren a top contender to chair Senate Banking, are poised to step up oversight of Nvidia over chip exports and circular financing (Maggie Eastland/Bloomberg) [8h]
• Fox closes its $22B Roku acquisition well ahead of the expected 2027 date; Anthony Wood joins Fox's board and co-chairs a new unit with Tubi, Fox One, and Roku (Todd Spangler/Variety) [8h]
• Sources: TSMC is considering expanding into manufacturing 3D DRAM at the request of Nvidia, its biggest customer, amid memory chip shortages (Qianer Liu/The Information) [9h]
• Employees at Microsoft, long known for its stability in the industry, are grappling with its decision to offer buyouts to 60,000 people as AI spending grows (Emmy Martin/New York Times) [10h]
• Experts say the new Democratic congressional majority will likely seek to rebuild CISA, prioritize AI security, revive local cyber grants, probe DOGE, and more (Eric Geller/Cybersecurity Dive) [11h]
• In preliminary findings, the EU says TikTok breached the DSA by failing to prevent its recommendation algorithm from trapping users in harmful "rabbit holes" (Alexander Martin/The Record) [12h]
• Sources: Democrats are eyeing Apple, Meta, and Elon Musk-led companies as early congressional investigation targets, after winning House and Senate majorities (Pranshu Verma/Washington Post) [12h]
• Sources: Nvidia is requiring Southeast Asian customers seeking Nvidia Cloud Partner status to enroll in a program that tracks the locations of their AI chips (Mackenzie Hawkins/Bloomberg) [12h]
• Elon Musk says Tesla plans to wind down production of the Cybertruck at its Texas Gigafactory in mid-2027 "to make room for increased Cybercab production" (Kana Inagaki/Financial Times) [13h]
• Cleanview: ~40% of planned data center capacity is in states where newly elected governors have pledged to pause or halt construction (Bloomberg) [15h]
• Blockaid: Binance hackers stole ~$2.5B, or 40% of the $6.3B haul, in a single Ethereum transaction using wallet permissions that cost just $15 to set up (Sidhartha Shukla/Bloomberg) [17h]
• NY-based Kalepa, whose AI platform supports insurance underwriting, pricing, and portfolio management, raised a $75M Series B led by Updata at a $470M valuation (Manya Saini/Reuters) [17h]
• Sources: China's top memory maker YMTC plans to source up to 70% of equipment for its fourth chip factory locally, up from just over 50% for its third factory (Reuters) [18h]
• Asian tech stocks plunge amid fears US Democrats may delay data centers; Taiwan's Taiex sees a record intraday point drop, Kospi falls 8.7%, and Nikkei 6.7% (Jada Nagumo/Nikkei Asia) [18h]
• Potential Sciences, an AI startup building large-scale chemical data sets, secured backing from the UK's Sovereign AI Fund, as part of an eight-figure raise (Joel Khalili/Wired) [19h]
• Google rolls out Gemini Omni 1.2 Flash, which creates clips up to 15 seconds, vs. 10 seconds with Omni 1.1, has better reference adherence, and costs 30% less (Matthias Bastian/The Decoder) [20h]
• Perplexity rolls out Teammates, an always-on AI agent system that integrates with Computer to handle multiple roles and execute large-scale tasks simultaneously (Emma Roth/The Verge) [21h]
• Sources: UK neobank Monzo is exploring a new fundraising round valuing it at ~£7.5B after failing to be acquired by Nu Holdings and struggling to sell a stake (Financial Times) [22h]
• Filing: Airbnb discloses that it has the option to invest in and license tech from CEO Brian Chesky's stealth AI lab; source: Chesky has self-funded it so far (The Information) [22h]
• Sources: Thinking Machines Lab is raising $5B led by Accel at a $40B pre-money valuation, more than tripling its valuation from its last public round last year (Business Insider) [23h]
• Artificial Analysis says Inkling 2 Small matches Gemini 3.8 Flash (high) in its index and would be the top open model outside China once its weights are out (Artificial Analysis) [23h]
• Lyft reports Q3 revenue up 8% YoY to $1.82B, vs. $1.92B est., and a net loss of $0.03 a share, vs. an est. profit of $0.20 a share; LYFT drops 8%+ after hours (Kelly Cloonan/Wall Street Journal) [23h]
• Meta indefinitely pauses its new commercial terms, which critics say would let it scrape sites of business users, after publisher outcry and court injunctions (Nieman Lab) [23h]