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) [34m]
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) [3h]
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) [5h]
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) [7h]
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) [8h]
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) [9h]
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]