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The US AI data center boom is consuming capital, power, and people that the rest of the economy needs, and is crowding out Trump's manufacturing revival plans (Bloomberg)

Defakto, which lets enterprises secure automated interactions between internal systems and AI agents or other non-human actors, raised a $30.75M Series B (Chris Metinko/Axios)

Microsoft says its Gaming Copilot feature, which recently hit Windows 11 as a public beta, uses screenshots to understand in-game events, not to train AI models (Jowi Morales/Tom's Hardware)

Seneca, which is developing autonomous firefighting drones, raised $60M in seed and Series A rounds led by Caffeinated Capital and Convective Capital (Christopher Marquis/Forbes)

Austin-based Roller, a provider of venue management software, raised $50M led by Insight Partners, taking its total funding to over $100M (Chris Metinko/Axios)

Singapore-based wealth management platform Endowus raised $70M+, bringing its total funding to $130M+, and says the new capital will boost its AI advisory tools (Katrina Bianca Cuaresma/DealStreetAsia)

Sources: AI chip startup SambaNova is exploring a sale after it struggled to complete a fundraising round; SambaNova was last valued at $5B in 2021 (Valida Pau/The Information)

Kyrgyzstan launches a national stablecoin and a CBDC in partnership with Binance; CZ says a national cryptocurrency reserve includes Binance's BNB token (Aigerim Turgunbaeva/Reuters)

Glasgow-based Chemify, which combines AI with robotics and chemistry to rapidly make novel molecules for pharmaceutical companies, raised a $50M+ Series B (Alex Scott/Chemical & Engineering News)

Pave Bank, which lets businesses manage both fiat and digital assets in real time, raised a $39M Series A led by Accel, with Tether and others participating (RT Watson/The Block)

A profile of Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger, who left in 2002 and whose claims that Wikipedia has a liberal bias are fueling the right's campaign against it (Will Oremus/Washington Post)

Sources: OpenAI is developing AI tools to generate music from text and audio prompts, including capabilities such as adding guitar accompaniment to vocal tracks (The Information)

Crypto infrastructure provider Fireblocks acquires Dynamic, which streamlines crypto wallet setup, authentication, and onboarding for 50M+ accounts, for ~$90M (CTech)

A look at AI startups aiming to address loneliness among the elderly; a study predicts the AI market for aging and elderly care will grow to over $43B in 2025 (Forbes)

How Changpeng Zhao's pardon frees him to refocus on reclaiming ground in the US market, where Binance.US only has a 0.75% share of bitcoin trading volume (Bloomberg)

Xiaomi says surging memory chip prices have raised the cost of making smartphones, after pricing of its new Redmi K90 series disappointed Chinese consumers (Reuters)

Grab is investing an undisclosed amount in May Mobility as part of a multiyear deal, which includes bringing robotaxis to Southeast Asia as soon as 2026 (Natalie Lung/Bloomberg)

Shares of Japanese optical fiber maker Fujikura are up ~171% YTD, outpacing the Nikkei's 22% and lifting its market cap to $33B+ amid the AI data center boom (Junko Fujita/Reuters)

Sources: PayPal to take over Carlyle's stake in Shopware, a German provider of e-commerce tools to merchants, with PayPal's stake increasing to ~41% from ~11% (Bloomberg)

Lindo St. Angel, VP of hardware at Amazon's Lab126 R&D unit since 2010, plans to leave on October 31; he helped develop the Echo, Astro robot, and Fire tablet (Greg Bensinger/Reuters)

Oreo maker Mondelez has spent $40M+ on an AI tool, developed with Publicis and Accenture, to cut costs for the production of marketing content by 30% to 50% (Jessica DiNapoli/Reuters)

Sources: X's advertising chief John Nitti, who joined in January, has left; X's CFO Mahmoud Reza Banki left in early October after less than a year in the role (Hannah Murphy/Financial Times)

Sources detail how Sam Altman, Jensen Huang, Marc Benioff, and others brokered a call between SF Mayor Daniel Lurie and Trump to stop National Guard deployment (Wall Street Journal)

Microsoft plans to bring its Halo franchise to the PlayStation for the first time with the launch of a 25th‑anniversary remake of Halo: Combat Evolved in 2026 (Zachary Small/New York Times)

Grindr board members Ray Zage and James Lu, part of an investor group that owns more than 60%, offer to take Grindr private for ~$3.46B; GRND closes up 18.63% (Reuters)

Source: President Trump has picked Michael Selig, the chief counsel for the SEC's crypto task force, to chair the CFTC, amid a crypto push (Bloomberg Law)

With an influx of Meta alums, some OpenAI staffers worry it is adopting Meta's tactics, like using social media dynamics with Sora and a softening stance on ads (The Information)

Interviews with 23 current and ex-AWS employees and others about AWS' challenges, including intense competition, internal bureaucracy, and lackluster AI efforts (Matt Day/Bloomberg)

Netflix shuts down Boss Fight Entertainment, the game studio behind mobile game Squid Game: Unleashed, after acquiring it in March 2022 (Jay Peters/The Verge)

Crypto.com follows Circle, BitGo, and others in applying for a US bank charter, as it seeks to further its custody-service business for products such as ETFs (Emily Mason/Bloomberg)

Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino says the company expects to earn close to $15B in profit in 2025, up from around $13B in 2024 (Bloomberg)

Automattic files counterclaims against WP Engine's October 2024 lawsuit and alleges that WP Engine has been abusing the WordPress trademark (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

New York-based Valthos, which is developing AI tools to detect and prevent AI-enabled bioweapon attacks, raised $30M from OpenAI, Founders Fund, and Lux Capital (Lizette Chapman/Bloomberg)

OpenAI launches a "company knowledge" ChatGPT update to let Business, Enterprise, and Education users search for data in connected apps like Slack and GitHub (Jess Weatherbed/The Verge)

Sources: banks are preparing to launch a $38B debt sale to fund Oracle data centers, including $23.25B for a Texas data center and $14.75B for a Wisconsin site (Jeannine Amodeo/Bloomberg)

HP plans to build millions of computers in Saudi Arabia by 2030, primarily for export to MENA, as part of the kingdom's plans to boost manufacturing and exports (Matthew Martin/Semafor)

UK prosecutors say the ringleader of a 2024 arson attack on Ukraine-linked businesses in London discussed kidnapping Revolut's Russia-born CEO Nikolay Storonsky (Michael Holden/Reuters)

IBM says it was able to run a key algorithm for correcting qubit errors, which runs alongside quantum chips, on readily available AMD chips; AMD closes up 7.63% (Stephen Nellis/Reuters)

Sources: JPMorgan plans to allow institutional clients globally to use their holdings of bitcoin and ether as collateral for loans by end of year (Emily Nicolle/Bloomberg)

The EU accuses Meta and TikTok of violating their obligations to give researchers adequate access to public data on their platforms under the DSA (Eliza Gkritsi/Politico)

EU accuses Meta under DSA of failing to give users easy ways to flag illegal content and adequate tools to appeal moderation decisions, in preliminary findings (Kim Mackrael/Wall Street Journal)

Pricempire: after Valve updated the exchange rate of Counter-Strike digital items, the market fell by $1.75B, or 25%, on October 23; in 2024, a gun sold for $1M (Cecilia D'Anastasio/Bloomberg)

A US judge says Meta lawyers told staff to block or remove parts of internal teen mental health research to limit liability; Meta says no findings were removed (Isaiah Poritz/Bloomberg Law)

Apple may turn off App Tracking Transparency in Europe due to "intense lobbying efforts" in Germany and other countries over alleged anticompetitive conduct (Marcus Mendes/9to5Mac)

Sources: Snap is in talks with investors, including Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, to raise at least $1B for its AR glasses division (Alex Heath/Sources)

US Energy Secretary Chris Wright urges FERC to limit the process for connecting data centers to power grids to 60 days, a process that typically takes years (Bloomberg)

Trump's pardon of CZ is a gift to the crypto industry, which has spent heavily to ease regulations and rewrite history to remove associations with criminality (Max Chafkin/Bloomberg)

Mustafa Suleyman says Microsoft won't provide erotica AI services and that "other companies will build that", after Sam Altman said ChatGPT would offer erotica (Salvador Rodriguez/CNBC)

EA and Stability AI announce a partnership to build game developer tools, including "smarter paintbrushes" to quickly generate high-quality 2D textures (Jennifer Maas/Variety)

Filing: Applied Materials plans to cut ~4% of its global workforce and expects the layoffs to cost $160M to $180M; it had 36,100 employees as of the end of July (Nick Turner/Bloomberg)