Nvidia

Elon Musk says SpaceX has closed $40 billion in debt financing to buy GPUs, with deliveries expected in the first and second quarters of 2027. Full story in slides above. Sources: Reuters, CoinDesk, BusinessToday, SiliconANGLE, October 25-26, 2026.

Daytona Platforms announced on October 23 that it raised $60 million in a Series B round at a $1 billion valuation, a bet that the next big cloud will be built for machines, not people. FirstMark Growth led the round, and the Daytona AI agent cloud now has $91 million in total funding behind it. That’s a unicorn in three years. Founder Ivan Burazin put the pitch in one sentence. “Agents don’t work like the long-lived services today’s cloud was designed for. They spin up thousands of short, stateful jobs nobody planned in advance, and they need a cloud built for that,” Burazin wrote in a blog post announcing the round. ...

Apple is the most valuable company in the world again. For a few hours, anyway. Shares traded above $351 on Friday morning, an intraday record, pushing Apple’s market capitalization to roughly $5.12 trillion and nudging past Nvidia’s $5.06 trillion, according to figures reported by 9to5Mac and Seeking Alpha. By the afternoon, Nvidia had slipped back in front. The two are the only companies on the planet worth more than $5 trillion, and on Friday they were separated by less than one percent. ...

Jensen Huang says Nvidia’s era of writing giant private checks to AI labs is coming to an end. Speaking on Wednesday at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom conference in San Francisco, the Nvidia CEO said the company’s $30 billion investment in OpenAI “might be the last time it has the opportunity to ‘invest in a consequential company like this.’” The $100 billion deal the two companies discussed in September 2025, he added, “does not seem feasible.” ...

Nvidia unveiled the Agile ONE SN, a 1.4-meter reference humanoid built with Agile Robots, at GTC Berlin on October 21, 2026 — part of a major Isaac platform expansion that also brings Isaac Lab 3.0, Isaac OS, and new simulation tools for robotics researchers. Full story in slides above — Sources: GlobeNewswire via Morningstar, NDTV Profit, EconoTimes, Counterpoint Research, October 21–22, 2026.

The three companies racing to build the future spent the third quarter of 2026 buying influence over how that future gets regulated — and each one set a new record for lobbying spending doing it. Nvidia, Anthropic and OpenAI poured a combined $7.5 million into federal lobbying between July and September, according to an analysis of new disclosure filings by POGO Investigates, with each company posting its highest quarterly total ever. ...

Six months of construction, fourteen days of hookup. That was the pitch Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang brought to Berlin on Wednesday, and it amounts to the company’s most aggressive move yet against the biggest bottleneck in the AI buildout: the time it takes to actually turn a site into a working data center. The vehicle is Nvidia DSX POD, unveiled at the GTC Berlin keynote on October 21. It’s a reference design for complete Vera Rubin AI factories that partners build inside modular containers. Each container carries computing, networking, cabling, rack-level power, and liquid cooling, all assembled, integrated, and validated in a factory before the unit ever ships. Once it lands, a prepared site just connects power, cooling, and network, and the whole thing can go live in as little as 14 days, down from the six months a traditional onsite build takes. ...

Tenstorrent, the chip startup trying to chip away at Nvidia’s grip on AI hardware, raised $1.5 billion on Monday at a $6.2 billion valuation. The round more than doubled the company’s value from the roughly $2.6 billion it fetched in late 2024. That makes the 10-year-old startup one of the best-funded Nvidia challengers on the planet. CEO Jim Keller told Bloomberg the company turned down acquisition interest from Intel and Qualcomm, reportedly at valuations of up to $5 billion, to stay independent and raise more capital instead. The deciding factor, Keller said, was Tenstorrent’s Galaxy servers: the company showed they could run DeepSeek’s open-weight models, and decided the business was worth building, not selling. ...

Mercedes-Benz is putting its self-driving future in Nvidia’s hands. The two companies announced on October 16 that they’re extending their strategic partnership to develop the next generation of driver assistance and automated driving systems, with SAE Level 4 as the stated goal. That’s the level where the car handles the entire driving task on its own, with no human ready to take the wheel, inside defined operating conditions. The announcement, published in Nvidia’s newsroom and in a Mercedes-Benz press release from Stuttgart and Santa Clara, sketches a clean division of labor. Mercedes contributes what only a carmaker can: its vehicle engineering, its safety standards, and MB.OS, the in-house operating system that manages driving features and delivers over-the-air updates. Nvidia supplies the computing muscle. ...

Elon Musk has put a date on the space data center. Reacting Thursday to a podcast clip of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Musk wrote on X that the Star Mind computer, the space-grade AI system SpaceX is co-engineering with Nvidia, “is far better than almost anyone expects and will reach volume production next year.” That’s 2027. Musk didn’t say what volume means, and nobody should mistake a Musk target for a schedule. But the exchange was the clearest signal yet that the orbital-compute project, first teased in August, is moving from concept toward an industrial plan. ...

Volvo is going all in on Nvidia for hands-free driving. The Swedish automaker said Thursday it will use three pieces of Nvidia hardware and software in future vehicles to build an automated driving system that can navigate urban streets and highways on its own, deepening a partnership that stretches back nearly a decade. It’s the latest sign that car companies want chips-and-software platforms, not just parts suppliers, at the center of their cars. ...

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said Thursday he does not believe CoreWeave needs a financial backstop, calling the AI cloud firm’s financial strength “improving every day” even as its bonds sank and the cost of insuring its debt hit a record. CoreWeave shares recovered about 6% after his remarks. Full story in slides above — Sources: Reuters, Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, October 15, 2026.

Apple is a $5 trillion company now. Not for a few minutes in the middle of a trading day, but at the closing bell. The iPhone maker’s shares hit a record on Wednesday, Oct. 14, 2026, and finished just far enough above the line to push its market capitalization to $5.005 trillion, according to Dow Jones Market Data. That makes Apple only the second company in history to close above $5 trillion, after Nvidia. Apple’s market value had crossed the threshold six times before during intraday trading, but it had never once closed there. Wednesday it squeaked past. ...

The bond market just delivered its harshest verdict yet on the AI boom. The market for AI credit default swaps flashed its brightest warning overnight: five-year default insurance on Oracle widened by 26 basis points to a record 288 bps, the most expensive it has ever been to insure the cloud giant’s debt, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence data cited by Reuters. SoftBank’s five-year spread widened 24 bps to 424 bps. And at data center operator CoreWeave, the number blew past 1,000 bps, per LSEG data. In plain English, it now costs $2.88 a year to insure $100 worth of Oracle bonds against default, and roughly ten times that, proportionally, for CoreWeave. Insurers don’t charge record prices to healthy borrowers. ...

Nvidia no longer owns China’s AI chip market. Its share of the country’s data-center AI accelerator market fell to 34% in the first half of 2026, down from a commanding position just a year ago, according to IDC data seen by Reuters and published October 13. The headline number is stark. Nvidia shipped 678,000 AI accelerators in China between January and June, a 44% drop from the same period last year. Huawei, meanwhile, shipped 572,000 units — nearly double the roughly 300,000 it managed a year earlier — taking its share to 28%. The gap between the world’s most valuable chip company and China’s most sanctioned one is now six percentage points. ...

Microsoft wants to run its own AI on its own silicon. The company unveiled Maia 300 on Monday, its third-generation custom AI chip, and said it plans to put potentially more than one million of them to work across its infrastructure in 2027. That’s not a typo. One million chips, in multi-gigawatt installations, all bought from nobody. The announcement, covered by Reuters, CNBC, and Microsoft’s own news center, marks the most aggressive step yet by a hyperscaler to loosen Nvidia’s grip on the AI compute market. From 2027, Microsoft says Maia will become the primary inference system for its products and services, meaning the Copilots, the Azure AI workloads, and even some OpenAI models running on Microsoft’s cloud will increasingly run on chips Microsoft designed itself. ...

Satya Nadella announced Microsoft’s third-generation AI chip, the Maia 300, on October 12, 2026, saying multi-gigawatt deployments start in 2027. Microsoft says the chip delivers 40% more tokens per watt than leading GPU-based systems — the efficiency claims come from Microsoft, which hasn’t named the comparison systems. Sources: Digit.in, AIStockWire, Notebookcheck, October 12, 2026.

TSMC is about to make it six. The world’s biggest maker of advanced AI chips is expected to post a sixth consecutive quarter of record profit when it reports third-quarter earnings this Thursday, October 15 — and analysts say the AI chip boom has made the outcome close to a formality. The numbers are already most of the way there. TSMC told investors on October 8 that Q3 revenue reached NT$1.494 trillion (about $46.7 billion), a 50% jump from a year earlier that beat analyst forecasts and even topped the upper end of the company’s own guidance. September alone pulled in NT$511.86 billion, up 54.6% year over year, while sales across the first nine months of 2026 hit NT$3.90 trillion, up 41.1%. ...

Amazon is in advanced talks to acquire AI startup Decart in a deal valued at around $7 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday — a move aimed at loosening Nvidia’s grip on AI computing. The deal isn’t final and could still fall apart, per the report. Sources: Wall Street Journal via Reuters; The Jerusalem Post; Bloomberg via Business Standard, October 11-12, 2026.

Amazon wants Decart, and it’s willing to pay roughly $7 billion for it. The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday that the ecommerce giant is in advanced talks to acquire the Israeli-founded AI startup, citing people familiar with the matter — a deal that would be one of the largest Israeli tech exits ever and one of Amazon’s biggest acquisitions in recent memory. The talks are advanced enough that a deal could come together soon, the Journal said, but nothing is signed and the negotiations could still collapse. ...