Flash News

TREE NEWS reports: Peter Thiel said in an interview with Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner that technological progress in the physical world has stalled since the 1970s, with advances confined to “bits” while “atoms” lag, and that this stagnation is the root of modern political polarization and zero-sum politics. He said AI is the last chance to restore growth, called the AI extinction debate overblown, and warned against Western precautionary brakes on AI.

TREE NEWS update: AMD CEO Lisa Su met with TSMC in Hsinchu on Oct. 6 after visiting Foxconn, Quanta, Asus and Acer, confirming that AMD’s previously announced $10 billion Taiwan supply chain investment is on schedule and will be raised further due to surging AI demand. Su said close cooperation with key suppliers and partners remains essential.

TREE NEWS reports: DeepSeek is close to locking in at least 80 billion yuan ($12 billion) in its latest funding round, far exceeding its original target and paving the way for an IPO planned for early 2027. CATL and Tencent are among the lead investors, and terms signed so far could push the final size to nearly 100 billion yuan. DeepSeek initially sought about 50 billion yuan.

TREE NEWS reports: AMD CEO Lisa Su said chip demand will remain “very strong” over the coming years as AI applications increase, adding that chips remain in short supply and memory chip supply is still tight. She said AI is good for the world and will not harm humanity, and called stronger coordination among major US AI companies important. Su is due to meet TSMC executives later on Tuesday.

TREE NEWS reports: Seagate and Toshiba are competing to acquire TDK’s hard disk drive head business, with the deal potentially worth several billion dollars, people familiar with the matter said. Toshiba opened talks with TDK in the spring, and Seagate followed with a higher offer in the summer, as both seek to meet surging AI data-center demand for storage. TDK shares rose 7.3% in Tokyo on Tuesday afternoon on volume nearly three times the 20-day average.

TREE NEWS reports: Kuaishou’s AI video-generation unit Kling AI has selected banks for a potential Hong Kong initial public offering that could raise at least $1 billion, people familiar with the matter said. The company is working with CICC, Goldman Sachs and UBS, aiming to list as early as next year. Discussions are ongoing and details such as size and timing may change.

TREE NEWS update: Ethereum-based AI project IMD (identity.md), which aims to run a community-owned company staffed by AI agents, said its agent network opened to NFT holders on Sept. 20 and grew from dozens of nodes to more than 370 within five days, while the IMD token rose over 200% in a week. About 3.8 million IMD, roughly 32% of supply, is staked as sIMD, and the Uniswap V4 CappedBurnHook burns 85% of IMD removed from the main ETH/IMD pool. Paid demand remains small: 115 orders at 0.5 IMD each, about $560.

TREE NEWS update: OKX founder and CEO Star said at the OKX NOW global product and ecosystem conference in Singapore on October 6 that the exchange is evolving from a crypto trading venue into a global fintech platform spanning custody, payments, investing and wealth management. Star said global financial institutions including ICE and NYSE, Standard Chartered, Ripple and Circle have taken equity stakes in OKX, and that AI is now core infrastructure, with roughly 95% of engineering code merge requests handled through AI workflows.

TREE NEWS update: Moonshot AI is close to completing a pre-IPO funding round that would value the Chinese AI developer at $50 billion, with a planned listing in Hong Kong in the first quarter of 2027. The company is the developer of the Kimi chatbot. The round has not yet closed and no investors were named.

TREE NEWS reports: Hong Kong-listed large-model concept stocks rose, with Zhipu gaining 6.84% and MiniMax advancing 3.85%. The move lifted the sector’s China AI model names traded in Hong Kong.

TREE NEWS update: Amazon Web Services has added Zhipu’s GLM-5.3 model to its Amazon Bedrock platform, with AWS sharing revenue with Zhipu based on model usage volume. Zhipu said it has struck similar revenue-share arrangements with several other overseas cloud providers, and has signed comparable agreements with Alibaba Cloud’s Bailian platform, while Huawei Cloud has listed GLM-5.3 and reached intent on a similar partnership.

TREE NEWS reports: Nokia CEO Justin Hotard said the tech industry would build data centers twice as fast if not for current supply constraints. Speaking on the pace of AI infrastructure, he said it is impossible to call the current buildout overbuilding, since customers would likely also double their construction if they could. Hotard added he is confident the industry remains in the early stage of the AI buildout wave.

TREE NEWS reports: Investigators say a Bonita Springs, Florida woman’s use of Claude as a personal diary tripped Anthropic’s safety filters, prompting a human review team to report the content to police. Anthropic’s own terms of service permit the company to make such disclosures. The case highlights how AI safety monitoring can surface user conversations to law enforcement.

TREE NEWS update: Wall Street banks have led the arrangement of a $60 billion chip financing deal for Broadcom and Anthropic. The transaction ties Broadcom’s semiconductor supply to Anthropic’s AI compute needs. Further terms of the financing were not disclosed.

TREE NEWS reports: OpenAI is in talks with several UAE investment funds, including Abu Dhabi’s MGX, to help anchor a $30 billion funding round. The funds would invest as a syndicate and have discussed contributing up to $10 billion in total. BlackRock is also discussing joining the round alongside the syndicate.

TREE NEWS reports: Etched is evaluating acquisition interest at a valuation of $40 billion to $50 billion. The AI chip startup has drawn takeover inquiries that would value it at that range. No buyer, timeline or terms were disclosed.

TREE NEWS update: The operator of Wikipedia said an out-of-control OpenAI agent may be linked to a data service outage that occurred in May. The disclosure points to a possible connection between the AI system’s behavior and the disruption, though no further details were provided.

TREE NEWS reports: Meta and Microsoft are working to reduce employee reliance on Anthropic’s Claude models, with Microsoft cutting its spending on Claude by more than a third. The two companies are pushing staff toward alternative AI models as internal usage of Claude is scaled back.

TREE NEWS update: OpenAI will expand its content provenance program and add watermarking to eligible text generated by ChatGPT and Codex in the European Union over the coming weeks. The company said the move is intended to comply with the EU AI Act. The measure applies to qualifying text output produced in the EU region.

TREE NEWS reports: Bank of America strategists say the easy-money phase of betting on AI-related capital expenditure is fading, as the combination of rising AI spending and shrinking discretionary spending is now fully priced in. The trade is therefore harder to squeeze excess returns from, and the strategists argue it is time for a selective rotation, warning that capex intensity may be overpriced while underestimating the US consumer’s willingness to spend is dangerous.