01
Financial Times Tech ↗
Tencent agreed this year to a five-year lease across Oracle data centers in Southeast Asia, its largest overseas cloud deal, for access to about 100,000 advanced AI chips that US export rules keep out of China. People familiar with the matter put the contract at about $7 billion, with roughly 30 percent paid upfront. The Financial Times reported that the spending helped push Tencent to a negative free cash flow of 13.8 billion yuan, about $2 billion, in the second quarter, its first negative quarter in more than a decade.
02
Financial Times Tech ↗
Japan's largest power company, JERA, signed a memorandum with Dell and UK developer RHAELM to build AI data centers, a national push the Financial Times said could reach $140 billion. The first site, beside JERA's gas plant in Chiba near Tokyo, is a 400-megawatt campus expected to cost more than $15 billion, with Apollo backing RHAELM and Dell supplying rack-scale servers. Phased operation is expected from around 2028, full capacity in 2029, and several gigawatts nationwide in the 2030s.
03
CNBC Technology ↗
OpenAI said it disrupted a campaign to extract protected reasoning from its models, which it calls adversarial distillation, and linked a core cluster to China's Moonshot AI, maker of Kimi. Activity began in early July, jumped to 16,000 requests from more than 4,000 users over two days, and was tied to a wider cluster of more than 15,000 users before OpenAI said it was fully stopped by July 28. OpenAI said the operators did not breach its encryption, databases, or stored chats, and that it shared the findings with the Frontier Model Forum and government channels.
04
CNBC Technology ↗
SpaceX carried Alphabet's tensor processing units into orbit on Thursday on a Falcon 9 from Vandenberg, aboard Planet Labs satellites that include a solar-powered prototype with Google's chips. The flight is the first in-orbit test of Project Suncatcher, the effort Google described in November 2025 to see whether solar-powered machine learning can run continuously in space. SpaceX has pitched orbital computing as a way around the power and land fights facing data centers on the ground.
05
CNBC Technology ↗
Governor Gavin Newsom signed SB 947, the No Robo Bosses Act, reversing an earlier veto and making California the first state to bar employers from relying only on AI to fire or discipline workers. If an automated system is the primary basis for those decisions, a human must review them using other evidence such as manager evaluations, peer reviews, and personnel files. Affected workers must get written notice that AI was primarily used, a description of the data involved, and a human contact who can explain the decision.
06
Bloomberg Technology ↗
Factory chief executive Matan Grinberg said on Sept. 30 that the coding startup dropped adviser Chris Degnan as a board observer for what Grinberg called unethical conduct involving rival Cognition, maker of the Devin agent. Degnan, later named Cognition's chief revenue officer, and Cognition chief executive Scott Wu denied taking Factory's confidential information. Cognition closed a funding round in September at a $48 billion valuation, and Factory raised the same month at $5 billion.
07
Ars Technica ↗
US District Judge Amit Mehta dismissed antitrust suits by Chegg and by Penske Media, owner of Rolling Stone and Variety, over Google AI Overviews. The publishers said Google used pages they had indexed for search to answer queries and cut their traffic, with no way to stay in search and opt out of AI answers. Mehta wrote that an expectation of search traffic is not a contract, while saying the court was not unsympathetic to unpaid reuse of publisher work.
08
BBC Technology ↗
Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey told the BBC that heavy investment in AI could produce market shocks, and that asset prices could correct because not every company priced as a winner will be one. He cited Nvidia's $5.5 trillion valuation and the hundreds of billions of dollars Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon are spending on the technology. Bailey said AI can strengthen growth, but also cyber attacks and deepfakes, and that the Bank is watching the inflows so the financial system can absorb shocks.
09
Unite. AI ↗
San Francisco semiconductor startup Volantis said it raised an $88 million Series A, co-led by Lachy Groom and Abstract Ventures, to commercialize its photonic A-1 inference system. John Doerr, VXI Capital, Triatomic, and Susa Ventures joined, along with angels including Dwarkesh Patel, Naveen Rao, and Sholto Douglas. Volantis said the round brings total funds raised to $97 million. The company uses vertical-cavity lasers, the same class of device in iPhone Face ID, to connect AI chips and memory.
10
MIT Tech Review ↗
Michal Irani and colleagues at the Weizmann Institute built a tool that reconstructs the picture a person is looking at from a brain scan, and that can also predict brain activity from an image. Irani said it could eventually help locked-in patients communicate, or let scientists recreate the content of dreams. Neuroethicist Judy Illes of the University of British Columbia, who was not on the study, called the work magnificent and pointed to possible therapeutic use for people with neurologic conditions.