Flash News

TREE NEWS update: Tencent unveiled Buddy One, a cross-app AI office suite for individual users, at its Global Digital Ecosystem Summit on October 29. The suite connects Tencent Docs, Tencent Meeting, Tencent Drive and ima on a shared WorkBuddy Agent foundation, with unified accounts, compute credits and context across the products.

TREE NEWS update: The Shanghai Municipal People’s Government General Office issued an action plan to drive digital and intelligent upgrading of small and medium-sized enterprises, including expanded access to computing-power, model (Token) and data vouchers. The plan also directs the integrated-circuit first-run tape-out policy toward qualifying SME projects. It calls for a digital public service system offering free trials or discounts on data, computing, software and model services.

TREE NEWS update: Some of Canada’s largest banks are moving to restrict third-party AI agents, including Meta Platforms’ Muse, from accessing their banking systems, citing security and liability risks. Royal Bank of Canada, the country’s largest lender, sent a notice to all employees on Tuesday announcing the policy change, saying the decision followed a “comprehensive security review” of the technology and its capabilities and aligns with its guidelines on responsible AI use.

TREE NEWS update: Scientists at the University of Science and Technology of China have fabricated a metallic carbon nanobelt composed solely of five- and seven-membered rings, dubbed the “pentagon-heptagon” carbon nanobelt, the university said on Oct. 29. The sub-nanometer-wide one-dimensional structure, made of carbon atoms linked by covalent bonds, was shown to achieve efficient electron transport. The findings were published online the same day in the journal Nature.

TREE NEWS update: Agibot co-founder, president and CTO Peng Zhihui unveiled Worken, a metric for measuring the value of physical AI, at the company’s AIGBOT INNOVATION DAY on Oct. 29. Worken, or effective intelligent work hours, is designed to measure the actual output of autonomous robot operations. The 2026 Embodied Intelligence Industry Innovation Report was released at the same event.

TREE NEWS update: Samsung Electronics said third-quarter HBM4 sales tripled from the previous quarter, with the company’s entire 2027 HBM supply already sold out. The disclosure gives the clearest signal yet of demand for next-generation high-bandwidth memory used in AI accelerators.

TREE NEWS update: Samsung Electronics plans to begin mass production of HBM4E in the first half of 2027. The company disclosed the timeline for its next-generation high-bandwidth memory chip without providing further details on capacity or customers. HBM4E is the successor to HBM4, which is used in AI accelerators.

TREE NEWS update: China released its first batch of artificial intelligence models for extreme weather based on Fengyun meteorological satellites at the 2026 Fengyun Satellite User Conference on Oct. 29. The model covers seven typhoon characteristics and integrates more than 20 satellite observation products, running an interpretation every 15 minutes and generating a report in 27 seconds. A separate severe convection nowcasting model extends warning lead time to four hours.

TREE NEWS update: Samsung Electronics said it expects continued profit growth in the fourth quarter and a strong chip market through 2027, with investment in new fabs and infrastructure aimed at meeting demand from artificial intelligence and high-performance computing. The company also warned its DX division will face pressure in the fourth quarter from rising component costs.

TREE NEWS update: Samsung Electronics said AI-driven demand growth in 2027 will far outpace industry supply, with enterprise AI infrastructure capital expenditure expected to reach historic levels as the AI ecosystem expands. The company plans to lead the high-end memory chip market and optimize its AI-driven product portfolio while securing multi-year contracts to build a stable sales base. Its System LSI business plans to expand flagship SoC chip sales in 2027.

TREE NEWS update: SK Hynix said its DRAM and high-bandwidth memory (HBM) production is effectively sold out for the next three years through 2029, with customer demand exceeding its current capacity by more than twofold, CEO Kwak Noh-Jung said on an earnings call. The company forecast memory supply shortages will persist until at least 2030 and plans to sharply raise capital expenditure and capacity in 2027. SK Hynix also scrapped the planned U.S. IPO of subsidiary Solidigm.

TREE NEWS update: Microsoft’s cloud revenue surpassed $63 billion, with growth accelerating to 30% year over year, CEO Satya Nadella said on the company’s analyst call. Copilot daily active users rose nearly 50% quarter over quarter and more than fivefold year over year, while customers with over 50,000 Copilot seats grew more than eightfold. Agent-generated pull requests on GitHub rose sixfold in six months and now account for over a third of all PRs on the platform.

TREE NEWS reports: Microsoft’s Azure sales rose to $33.2 billion in the quarter ended September, with total revenue reaching $92.3 billion and capital expenditure climbing to $45.2 billion, below expectations. The company said it expects capital spending to exceed $50 billion in the current quarter and Azure sales growth of up to 50% in the quarter ending December. The results reassured investors amid mounting concern over whether AI investments are paying off.

TREE NEWS update: FuriosaAI, a South Korean AI chip startup, has closed a $620 million Series D round at a $2.9 billion valuation, roughly four times its previous $735 million valuation. Investors include Infinitum Partners, Korea’s National Growth Fund, which contributed $280 million, Jericho Capital, Worldline Capital, QUDA Capital and NeoFort Holding, with existing backers Naver, Korea Development Bank, DSC Investment, Nextrans and Kakao Investment also participating. The Export-Import Bank of Korea made its first direct investment in a startup.

TREE NEWS reports: Public mutual funds in China kept heavy exposure to the electronics and communications sectors in the third quarter even as the tech rally that led the first half pulled back, with managers diverging on AI. Some stuck with computing-power supply chains while shifting sub-sectors, others moved to AI applications, and more cautious managers balanced allocations or exited. Fund managers remain long-term bullish on AI but are refining views on valuation and structural direction.

TREE NEWS reports: Banks are postponing the sale of bonds intended to refinance part of a $15 billion loan that funds a data center linked to Anthropic PBC near Hubbard, Texas, after the state paused new project approvals to assess grid risk. Lenders led by Morgan Stanley had aimed to sell $5 billion-$7 billion to high-yield investors in September; the sale may now be split over the coming year. The package includes a $14.2 billion one-year loan and a $1.4 billion five-year revolver.

TREE NEWS update: Microsoft disclosed in a regulatory filing that it recorded $10 billion in revenue from its commercial arrangement with OpenAI, including revenue sharing, in its fiscal 2027 first quarter ended Sept. 30 — about 11% of total quarterly revenue of $92.3 billion. OpenAI’s payable to Microsoft rose to $7.2 billion at the end of September from $6 billion at the end of June, while Microsoft’s stake in OpenAI slipped to 24% from about 25%. Azure revenue was $33.2 billion, up 48% year over year.

TREE NEWS reports: Foreign-owned mutual fund managers including BlackRock, Neuberger Berman, Allianz and AllianceBernstein adjusted their A-share portfolios in the third quarter, adding defensive assets such as banks as the market rotated. The managers remain constructive on the A-share market despite short-term volatility and continue to view artificial intelligence as a sector with medium- to long-term investment value.

TREE NEWS update: Microsoft’s CFO said roughly three-quarters of the company’s capital expenditure is allocated to short-lived assets, primarily CPUs and GPUs, including higher memory and storage costs. The company also expects about 30% of its cloud business’s remaining performance obligations (RPO) to be recognized as revenue over the next 12 months.

TREE NEWS update: Google will treat its TPUs as a platform it is prepared to sell, even to competitors, CEO Sundar Pichai said, as the company accelerates new customer deployments in the cloud. Pichai added that security and trust are the top concerns for users adopting AI agents.