TREE NEWS reports: DeepSeek has completed a funding round of about 100 billion yuan ($15 billion), with CATL and Tencent among the largest investors. The company raised its target at least twice during talks with investors, starting at 50 billion yuan, then 80 billion yuan, before reaching the final amount. The round marks one of the largest private fundraisings by a Chinese AI company.
TREE NEWS update: The 2026 World Laureates Forum will take place at the Shanghai Lingang Center from Oct 30 to Nov 1 under the theme “Paradigm Shift: The Next Decade of Scientific Breakthroughs.” The event is hosted by the China Association for Science and Technology, with the Shenzhen Pengrui Public Welfare Foundation and the Sequoia Charity Foundation as co-hosts. Wan Gang, former president of the China Association for Science and Technology, and 2013 Nobel physiology or medicine laureate Randy Schekman serve as the forum’s Chinese and foreign co-chairs.
TREE NEWS update: China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and seven other departments issued the “Industrial Foundation Capability Enhancement 15th Five-Year Plan,” calling for AI to be applied across product R&D, design simulation, pilot testing and production operations. The plan urges development of general and industry-specific large models, integration of industrial mechanisms with agent decision models, and new businesses such as model-as-a-service and agent-as-a-service.
TREE NEWS update: Tesla reported third-quarter revenue of $28.05 billion, essentially flat year over year, while net income attributable to common stockholders fell 43% to $787 million. Adjusted earnings per share of $0.48 beat the $0.43 consensus, and free cash flow turned positive at $1.53 billion. Operating margin slid to 2.6% as R&D spending jumped nearly 70% to $2.76 billion and stock-based compensation totaled $1.165 billion.
TREE NEWS reports: South Korea’s central bank said stock market volatility has increased amid concerns over a slowdown in artificial intelligence investment, with equities falling sharply on worries about slowing profitability in the semiconductor sector.
TREE NEWS reports: Chinese robot-concept stocks kept rallying, with Daye Co. hitting a fifth straight limit-up, Zhaowei Electromechanical sealing a limit-up and Leyard gaining over 10%, while Henghe Precision, Kesen Technology, Nanfang Road Machinery and Zhejiang Rongtai rose more than 6%. Nvidia upgraded its Isaac general-purpose robotics development platform, launching a new humanoid robot reference framework, simulation workflows and data tools aimed at accelerating general-purpose robot development.
TREE NEWS update: Anthropic launched Claude Duet, an around-the-clock AI agent, pitting it against Meta and OpenAI in the AI agent race. The launch came as Meta reported Q3 revenue and Q4 guidance above expectations and raised the lower bound of its AI capital spending guidance, while also planning to issue new non-voting shares. Meta said its Muse product has drawn tens of millions of users and that first-week shopping volume exhausted its quota.
TREE NEWS update: Unitree Technology will hold its 2026 World Physical AI Conference, with timing still to be announced. South Korea’s central bank publishes its rate decision, alongside meetings in Indonesia, the Philippines and Turkey, while the ECB enters its pre-meeting quiet period. US initial jobless claims for the week of Oct. 17 are due at 20:30 Beijing time, followed by the Conference Board’s September leading index and preliminary eurozone October consumer confidence at 22:00.
TREE NEWS update: More than 10 million people in the US and Canada have set up Meta’s Muse personal AI agent in about six weeks, with roughly 25% of those users engaging with it on any given day, Meta said on its earnings call. Shopping is Muse’s most common use case. Meta is building compute to serve over 1 billion Muse users in coming years, with compute cost a key constraint, and executives said subscriptions plus small transaction fees will be central to monetization, though details remain sparse.
TREE NEWS update: Cloud deployment platform Railway detected anomalous activity in the system storing customer environment variables, with an initial investigation showing an unauthorized third party may have accessed encrypted variables and decrypted some of their contents, potentially including API keys, database and registry credentials. Railway said the incident appears to be part of a recent series of attacks on platform companies aimed at compromising AI inference providers, and has notified upstream providers to revoke keys. All deployments have been paused, and users are advised to rotate environment variables, API keys and private repository credentials and review service logs.
TREE NEWS update: OpenAI updated its usage policies, effective November 20, 2026, requiring operators of model access intermediary platforms such as model routers and AI gateways to obtain prior approval from OpenAI. Integrating OpenAI models directly into applications for functionality remains exempt. The new policy also bans using OpenAI models or their outputs to prepare, curate or supply training data or signals for competing models, including building training tasks, reinforcement learning environments and scoring or ranking feedback, and prohibits extracting protected reasoning content via unauthorized access or reverse engineering.
TREE NEWS update: Tesla executives were asked about the biggest challenge currently facing Optimus, and CEO Elon Musk said it is the hands and fingers, specifically the fingers and palm. Musk noted that humans can achieve self-repair of limbs, while robots cannot. The remarks address the humanoid robot’s dexterity limitations.
TREE NEWS reports: As of the Oct. 21 close, 150 listed companies had disclosed third-quarter results, with 98 posting year-on-year net profit growth for the first nine months. Market attention focused on leaders including CATL, Fuyao Glass, Hygon Information, Hikvision, Zangge Mining and China Jushi. Some strong performers such as Dian Diagnostics saw sharp share-price gains after their reports. Analysts cited AI compute shifting from capex story to reported profit as a core theme.
TREE NEWS reports: SpaceX’s superintelligence business posted third-quarter revenue up more than eightfold year on year, while Super Micro Computer (SMCI) forecast first-quarter fiscal 2027 revenue well above the analyst consensus. The results from North American tech giants show global AI investment in data centers and compute infrastructure is accelerating rather than slowing. Industry figures expect optical modules, the backbone of AI data centers, to benefit directly, with 800G modules becoming the mainstream shipment and 1.6T volumes rising fast.
TREE NEWS update: OpenAI updated its usage policies effective November 20 to clarify rules on safe model development and sensitive AI uses, the company said. The company is also working to introduce a safety ID that customers can provide to help distinguish end users during investigations. The policy update sets clearer guidelines for developers and users of its AI models.
TREE NEWS update: Tesla’s chief financial officer said demand for the company’s Megapack battery storage systems from data centers is “extremely strong.” The remark points to continued appetite for large-scale energy storage as data-center buildouts expand. Tesla did not disclose figures or a timeframe for the demand.
TREE NEWS update: Elon Musk said he expects to roll out a test chip before June next year and reach mass production by the third quarter of 2028. The remarks set a timeline for the chip program but gave no details on the chip’s intended use, foundry partner or investment. No further figures or technical specifications were disclosed.
TREE NEWS update: Elon Musk said he expects problems related to Optimus to be resolved by the end of 2027. Tesla has already started production of “early product” Optimus units on a high-volume line at its Fremont, California factory. The timeline sets a target for the humanoid robot program’s commercial readiness.
TREE NEWS update: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company’s push toward “personal superintelligence,” which he has set as Meta’s strategic north star, has effectively been decades in the making. He said the direction aligns with more than 20 years of work empowering individuals with a voice and tools to connect as they choose. Extending that to AI means putting the technology’s capabilities in everyone’s hands, he said, calling these long-term bets that will pay off with continued execution.
TREE NEWS reports: Citadel founder Ken Griffin said investors are “almost certainly” in an AI bubble, warning that a glut of chips could crash prices the way empty airline seats do. Griffin, whose firm Citadel is one of the world’s largest hedge funds, nonetheless expects the survivors of the shakeout to lead for decades.