Hey folks!
Happy Friday! 😎 Tech news below:
TLDR -
📉 Markets seesawed as AI-capex anxiety, the Fed’s rate hold and election surprises collided.
📱 Apple introduced its M6 MacBook Pro while its $2,000 iPhone Duo developed an unfortunate habit of cracking.
☁️ Google and Microsoft tightened the cloud race, while Amazon’s AWS surged and Intel and ServiceNow stumbled under AI-era investor scrutiny.
🤖 GPT-6.1 Terra pushed frontier AI prices lower as Mistral Large 4 opened its trillion-parameter weights.
💰 Anthropic filed for an IPO amid a dealmaking spree spanning DoorDash–Instacart, Thrive–ADT and SpaceX’s $40B GPU financing.
🌎 Macro (Economic) and Trends
📉 Markets spent the week seesawing between AI optimism and AI-capex vertigo: the Nasdaq gained 1.2% Tuesday, fell 1.4% Thursday, and the 10-year Treasury yield finished near 4.92%.
🏦 The Federal Reserve held rates at 3.75%–4% despite two officials voting for a quarter-point increase, leaving stocks steady and bonds twitchy as inflation remains stubbornly above target.
🌎 Brazilian markets cratered after Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s surprise reelection.
🗳️ Israel’s election produced no clear winner: record turnout left both Netanyahu’s bloc and its rivals short of a governing majority, setting up coalition arithmetic that could take weeks.
🔬 Micro (Tech Companies)
📱 Apple’s iPhone Duo has an early durability problem: owners report screens cracking after hours or days of use, while Apple says only a small number of its $2,000 foldables are affected.
💻 Apple unveiled a 14-inch MacBook Pro with its M6 chip, a 12-core CPU and up to 24 hours of battery life; preorders begin October 28 before a November 6 release.
👗 Meta’s Style Sketch turns Instagram photos into a virtual closet, then assembles outfits and trip wardrobes around the weather, itinerary, body shape and clothes users already own.
☁️ Google and Microsoft’s cloud race is suddenly close: Google Cloud revenue more than doubled to $30.7 billion, just behind Azure’s $33 billion, but Google’s $9 billion cash burn sent its stock down nearly 10% while Microsoft gained about 3%.
🪖 Anduril and Qualcomm introduced BlueChip, a hardened laptop for military and emergency use whose initial components will be 90% sourced from the U.S. and allies, including a Snapdragon chip manufactured in Arizona.
🏗️ Oracle jumped more than 10% after promising to cap new capital raises at $20 billion through 2030 and turn free-cash-flow positive in fiscal 2028, easing fears that its $300 billion OpenAI infrastructure bet could swallow the balance sheet.
📉 ServiceNow plunged 19% despite 20.5% revenue growth and an 80% jump in AI deals; investors appear unconvinced that selling AI tools will offset the threat AI poses to traditional enterprise software.
💻 Intel plunged more than 23% after hours as slowing PC demand overshadowed its server-chip comeback; gross margin is expected to shrink from 43% to 37.1% this quarter.
🔒 Reddit is retreating behind a login wall after losing more than one million weekly search referrals in October; U.S. daily users fell to 50.7M even as revenue rose 53%
☁️ Amazon watched AWS revenue jump 39% to $46B, but AI spending pushed trailing free cash flow from positive $14.8B to negative $42.4B. The cloud is raining money; the data centers are drinking it.
📦 Amazon expanded Shop Direct to 250 million products from outside retailers, 2.5 times its March inventory, as it tries to keep shoppers from defecting to AI agents that can browse the entire internet.
📺 Instagram is testing 90-minute “Features,” challenging YouTube on its home turf without yet matching the 55% ad-revenue share that helps keep long-form creators loyal.
🪓 Microsoft offered voluntary buyouts to roughly 60,000 employees at the VP level and below, spanning Windows, Xbox, Copilot and finance teams across four countries.
🚗 General Motors is steering back toward hybrids, committing more than $2 billion to Michigan manufacturing.
🤖AI News
🌎 OpenAI’s GPT-6.1 Terra promises frontier-grade visual reasoning and computer use for $1 per million input tokens and $5 per million output tokens, half the price of GPT-5.6 Terra and one-tenth the token cost of GPT-6 Astra.
🔓 Mistral Large 4 is now downloadable: the trillion-parameter model reportedly beats other open models on agentic coding while using 47% fewer tokens than GLM-5.3 on comparable tasks.
🤝 Select M&A, Fundraises, IPO, Partnerships
M&A
⭐️🛵 DoorDash and Instacart are reportedly nearing a $17 billion deal, potentially combining restaurant delivery with one of the country’s largest grocery-shopping networks.
🧮 Guidewire will acquire AI underwriting startup Hyperexponential for $1.7 billion in cash, plus as much as $400 million tied to revenue targets; its pricing software is already used by nearly 600 insurers in 40 countries.
🏠 Thrive Holdings and ADT struck a $7.6B equity deal, worth $15.3B including debt, that will make the security company the foundation of Thrive’s OpenAI-powered smart-home business.
Fundraising
🚜 Bedrock Robotics raised $600 million at a $4.1 billion valuation after moving its autonomous excavator retrofit kits from pilots onto live construction projects in Nevada and Texas.
🏭 Foundry raised a $100 million Series A to build flexible factories where thousands of AI-powered industrial arms can switch from drones on Monday to batteries on Tuesday.
🪄 Wabi raised $55M at a $1.25B valuation after pivoting from prompt-built apps to a personal agent that creates custom interfaces for meals, fitness, travel and date nights.
Partnerships
🛰️ SpaceX and Apollo signed a roughly $40 billion financing agreement under which an Apollo-managed entity will buy Nvidia Vera Rubin systems and lease them to SpaceX for more than five years.
🧩 OpenAI and Google are preparing an unlikely silicon alliance: OpenAI plans to buy Google’s TPUs, giving Google’s chip business a marquee customer and Nvidia its most consequential competitive threat yet.
🤝 Nvidia and Meta deepened their relationship with a $3 billion Nvidia investment and plans for Meta to deploy more advanced Nvidia chips across its next generation of AI agents.
🚙 Rivian and Volkswagen expanded their $5.8B software venture to include Rivian’s in-car AI assistant, potentially bringing its voice-controlled agent framework to VW’s affordable ID EVERY1.
IPO
⭐️📈 Anthropic officially filed to go public under the ticker
ANT; first-half revenue jumped from $1.2 billion to $16.3 billion year over year, while seven cofounders retain 50.1% of the voting power.
⚱️ Gold Panning - For those who reached the bottom
🫡RIP Sir Patrick: Patrick Stewart, of the Xmen and Star Trek, passed away at 86
🔥 The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping earned “Rogue One of the franchise” comparisons after its premiere, while Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson and Woody Harrelson return for an epilogue 11 years after Katniss last picked up a bow.
🎤 Jay-Z will headline the 2027 Super Bowl halftime show at SoFi Stadium, turning the 30th anniversary of Reasonable Doubt into the world’s most expensive victory lap.
💕🍗Its the end of an era! Chicken Shop Date is ending its 12-year run with a one-night theatrical release, transforming Amelia Dimoldenberg’s fluorescent-lit YouTube flirtations into actual cinema. In honor of the perfect blend of interview, dead pan, and comedy, please enjoy my fav video of hers:
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