News

OpenAI data center expansion is going ahead, election results or not. Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar told CNBC on Friday that the company will keep pouring money into US data centers to meet customer demand, even after voters used the midterm elections to send a blunt message about the facilities. “When I think about the midterms, I need to keep thinking about how do we keep investing to meet customer demand,” Friar said in the interview, conducted at the Citi TMT Leadership Summit in Pebble Beach, California. ...

Dropbox is buying Tigris Data for $350 million in cash, and the Dropbox Tigris acquisition is the biggest deal in the company’s 19-year history. The agreement was signed November 3 and announced Thursday, November 5, alongside a new business called DBX Agent Cloud that will sell storage to companies building AI applications. For a company that made its name syncing files between your laptop and your phone, this is a sharp turn. Dropbox isn’t buying a consumer app. It’s buying pipes — the kind of storage infrastructure that AI agents and models need to hold the images, videos, and documents they work with. ...

Google DeepMind turned its AI agents loose on one of the oldest locks in internet security, and the agents came back with two new ways to pick it. The lock is 1024-bit RSA, an encryption standard the industry retired years ago. Your bank account is not in danger. DeepMind AI RSA encryption research was announced Friday, November 6, by Pushmeet Kohli, DeepMind’s vice president of science, in a post on X. Two technical papers back it up. The work was led by Dj Dvijotham and Abhradeep Thakurta, working with outside cryptographers Nadia Heninger of UC San Diego and Inria and Emmanuel Thomé of Inria. Everything ran in a sandbox, against a retired standard chosen precisely because attacking it harms nobody. ...

OpenAI has $11 billion in the bank at a $1.25 trillion valuation. Bloomberg reported the deal on Friday, and Reuters confirmed the figures from its own source. Investors wired the money on November 6, according to Bloomberg’s sources, and the first close covers just over half of a round that could reach about $20 billion in the coming weeks. It is a huge number by any measure. It is also a good deal smaller than the round OpenAI set out to raise. ...

Tesla Cybertruck production ends around the middle of 2027. Elon Musk said so himself on Friday, in a post on X that gave the stainless-steel pickup about eight more months on the line. The truck will have spent just three and a half years on sale by the time the factory moves on. “Tesla will be winding down production of the Cybertruck at Gigafactory Texas around the middle of next year to make room for increased Cybercab production,” Musk wrote, according to Reuters and The Verge. No exact stop date. No new home for the truck. Just a sentence, and the end of one of the strangest vehicles ever sold in America. ...

Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab is about to get a lot richer. Business Insider reported on Thursday, November 6, that the AI startup is set to close a $5 billion funding round led by Accel at a $40 billion pre-money valuation, a deal that could close as soon as this week. For Thinking Machines Lab funding, the numbers tell the story: the new price is more than triple the $12 billion valuation the company carried after its $2 billion seed round in July 2025. ...

Anthropic is improving its AI models about twice as fast as it did a year ago, according to an independent review published Thursday. METR, the nonprofit group that evaluates frontier AI systems, spent 11 weeks inside Anthropic’s data and concluded the company is likely advancing on well-specified tasks at around double the pace it managed between March 2024 and October 2025. Its central estimate puts the speedup at 1.9 times the old rate. The researchers said they would “not be surprised” if the real figure landed anywhere from 1.3 to 3 times. ...

Google is going to Wyoming. The company announced Thursday that it will build its first data center in the state, a $17 billion bet on Laramie County that pairs the campus with one of the largest carbon-capture power projects ever tied to a tech company. The Google Wyoming data center will sit near Cheyenne, built with Tallgrass Energy, Black Hills Energy, American Electric Power (AEP) and Related Digital. Google hasn’t said when the campus itself will open, but the power plant behind it has a date: AEP and its partners plan to start construction in 2026 and have it fully running by the end of 2028. ...

Wall Street’s AI trade just had its worst day in more than six years. The Nasdaq 100 fell 6.4% on Thursday, erasing a record $2.3 trillion in market value in a single session as investors dumped chip stocks and AI names after the Democrats’ midterm sweep. It was the tech-heavy index’s worst day since March 16, 2020, at the height of the Covid crash. The Nasdaq Composite dropped 5.5%, the S&P 500 lost 4.4% in its worst session since April 2025, and the Dow fell 3.44%, or 1,833 points. All 30 Dow stocks finished in the red. ...

Anthropic launched Personal Finance in Claude on Thursday, November 5, 2026, a beta that lets paying subscribers in the US link their bank, credit card, loan, and investment accounts to the chatbot and ask it plain-language questions about their own money. The rollout is gradual, so not every eligible account will see it on day one. Claude can read balances, credit limits, and up to 24 months of transactions across as many as 16 banks. It can tell you where the money went last month and flag recurring charges. What it cannot do is move any of it. ...

OpenAI released its most capable hacking model yet on Thursday, and almost nobody is allowed to use it. GPT-6 Cyber, a cyber-specialized version of GPT-6 Astra, scored 48.5% on the company’s ExploitGym benchmark, a test that asks a model to turn a known flaw into a working exploit against a remote target. That’s up from 32.1% for the previous model, GPT-5.6 Cyber, and 42.4% for Astra itself. OpenAI rates the new model “Critical” for cybersecurity, the top tier of its Preparedness Framework, and it is handing it out only to a select group of vetted customers. ...

Meta has acquired Conductor, an AI coding startup that lets developers run several coding agents at once in separate workspaces. Axios first reported the deal on Wednesday, November 4, and Meta confirmed it to TechCrunch the same day. Financial terms were not disclosed. Nobody has said what Meta paid. But the deal says a lot about where the coding-agent race is headed. Conductor’s cloud service shuts down on November 20, just 16 days after the announcement, and the company will start deleting users’ cloud data after that. Its team is moving to Meta’s Superintelligence Labs. ...

Micron’s stock crashed 11% on Thursday, November 5, after Bloomberg reported the memory chipmaker has largely stopped building a $4.5 billion plant in Taiwan. Shares traded at $708.64 in late morning, down from Wednesday’s close of $795.23. The drop capped a brutal week for the stock. Micron fell 7% on Wednesday, and Thursday’s slide pushed it roughly 42% below its record close of $1,213.56 on June 25. It also slipped below its 200-day moving average. ...

Apple quietly cut the daily amount some of its engineers can spend on AI tools from $300 to $200 last month, Bloomberg reported Wednesday, and deeper cuts are on the table. The caps cover tokens, the units of text and data that AI models chew through with every request, behind tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini, which Apple staff use for coding and other work. For the richest company on earth, $100 a day per engineer is pocket change. That’s exactly why the cut is worth paying attention to. ...

OpenAI’s security team set its AI loose on the Linux kernel and came back with a number that sounds made up: 948. In a single 10-day run in mid-October 2026, an autonomous pipeline built on an upcoming cyber model found, reproduced and exploited 948 distinct local privilege-escalation vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel, bugs that let an ordinary user account take over a machine as root. OpenAI published the results Wednesday, November 4, in a research post titled “A thousand fewer paths to root.” The whole run cost $1,213,430 in API credits, or about $1,279 per working exploit. ...

OpenAI is buying the company behind the code storage already running inside its coding agent. The OpenAI Pierre acquisition, announced Wednesday, November 4, 2026, will bring Pierre Computer Company and its Code Storage product into Codex, OpenAI’s AI coding tool. Financial terms were not disclosed. Axios first reported the deal, and OpenAI confirmed it the same day. Pierre’s technology is not new to Codex: its Trees and Diffs libraries already handle file browsing and change review inside the app. What changes now is ownership. Instead of licensing a piece of infrastructure, OpenAI will own it and build Code Storage directly into Codex. ...

Fal just raised $1.3 billion, and the number that matters most is not the check size. It’s the speed of the repricing: the San Francisco startup is now valued at $16 billion, double the $8 billion valuation it carried in April 2026. For Fal AI inference, that jump says where investors think AI money is moving next, from building models to running them at scale. Fal announced the round on Tuesday, November 3, alongside a completed Series E. Bessemer Venture Partners led the new Series F, with Nvidia, Sound Ventures, HOF Capital and T. Rowe Price also taking part. Bloomberg reported the $16 billion valuation, and TechCrunch confirmed the round’s size and lead investor. Fal described Nvidia as a strategic investor, which matters when the biggest bottleneck in this business is access to chips and computing capacity. ...

Apple just handed every iPhone developer the keys to its rebuilt assistant. On Tuesday, November 3, Apple opened a Siri AI Developer Preview in the iOS 27.3, iPadOS 27.3, macOS 27.3 and visionOS 27.3 betas, letting any app bring its content and actions directly into Siri AI. For Apple Siri AI developers, that’s the moment a feature first promised in 2024 stops being a demo and starts being something they can actually build with. ...

CrowdStrike wants a big red button for the AI agent era. The cybersecurity company announced on Tuesday, November 3, that it has agreed to buy two AI security startups, Fiddler AI and Dreadnode, for a reported $495 million, and it launched an AI kill switch designed to stop an agent the moment it goes off script. The announcements landed at CrowdStrike’s Fal.Con Europe event in Barcelona, and they target the same worry from three directions: stopping a bad agent mid-run, understanding what it did, and testing it before it ever reaches production. ...

AMD just gave the AI spending debate its loudest answer yet. The chipmaker reported third-quarter results after the closing bell on Tuesday, November 3, and the numbers landed on the bullish side of nearly every line that mattered: record revenue, a data center business that nearly doubled, and a fourth-quarter forecast well above what Wall Street had penciled in. Shares rose about 8% in extended trading after the release, according to Reuters, a move that capped a regular session in which the stock had already gained 3.65%. It was the kind of reaction that says less about one quarter and more about the question hanging over the whole AI trade: is the infrastructure spending still accelerating, or starting to cool? ...