Flash News

TREE NEWS update: The Seventh Manned Space Academic Conference opened in Beijing on October 31, drawing more than 800 experts and scholars from fields related to manned spaceflight. Under the theme “Gathering Wisdom Across the Galaxy, Empowering High-Quality Manned Space Development with Digital Intelligence,” participants are focusing on frontier technologies, engineering practices and development needs, and exchanging research results to deepen academic discussion on integrating digital intelligence with manned space engineering.

TREE NEWS reports: OpenAI has reduced its latest funding round target by $10 billion and is now seeking to raise about $20 billion at a valuation of $1.25 trillion. The revised target marks a scale-back from the company’s earlier fundraising goal. No further details on the round’s investors or timing were provided.

TREE NEWS reports: AI startup Baseten Labs Inc. is expected to raise a new funding round at a valuation of about $30 billion, more than double its previous valuation, people familiar with the matter said. No amount for the round was disclosed. The company develops infrastructure for deploying and serving AI models.

TREE NEWS reports: Anthropic PBC committed to spending nearly $900 billion on servers, buildings and power through future obligations as it accelerates infrastructure expansion. The figure far exceeds the liabilities shown on its balance sheet, with details buried in footnotes covering future leases and purchase agreements for data centers, electricity and GPUs. New Constructs CEO David Trainer called the scale of such “hidden debt” enormous, saying the company must spend heavily on training, inference and energy.

TREE NEWS update: Apple will open testing of its first Apple Intelligence features in China from Nov 4 with the latest iOS developer beta, ahead of a full release in December with iOS 27.3. The rollout includes live translation, writing tools, visual intelligence, a photo eraser and Genmoji. Under a partnership with Alibaba, Chinese users can access Qwen directly in Siri, writing tools and visual intelligence. Supported devices include iPhone 16 and later, iPhone 15 Pro models and iPhone Air.

TREE NEWS reports: The US AI Winners Index fell 5.87% on Friday, October 30, closing at 360.85 points, and has lost 15.05% over the course of October. The index declined steadily from October 6 to 16. On Friday, the biggest decliners among constituents were SanDisk, Coherent (COHR), Astera Labs, AMD, Dell, Nebius Group and Marvell Technology.

TREE NEWS update: S&P lowered its rating outlook on Meta Platforms from stable to negative, citing significant uncertainty over capital expenditures and free operating cash flow. The agency expects Meta to fund its projected free cash flow shortfall solely through debt in 2028, and said adjusted leverage could exceed 1.0x as early as 2027, the downgrade threshold for its AA- issuer credit rating.

TREE NEWS reports: Intel beat third-quarter earnings expectations but warned of a prolonged PC slump, sending its shares to their worst daily decline in 50 years. The weak forecast overshadowed demand for its AI chips. The selloff marks the steepest one-day drop for the chipmaker in half a century.

TREE NEWS reports: Barclays strategist Alexander Altmann said about 60% of the S&P 500’s projected earnings growth for next year comes from semiconductor forecasts, with the broader tech sector accounting for 75%. In an earlier report, Altmann wrote that AI is now almost synonymous with semiconductors, and noted the S&P 500’s similarity to South Korea’s Kospi is surpassing that of a diversified 500-security portfolio. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index fell as much as 9.4% intraday Friday, its largest drop since early June.

TREE NEWS reports: Reddit shares have fallen 44% this week after CEO Steve Huffman warned that Google’s AI-powered search features are reducing referrals to the platform. Weaker user growth and disappointing fourth-quarter guidance added to investor concerns, with the stock dropping as much as 30% in a single session.

TREE NEWS update: SanDisk’s high-bandwidth flash (HBF) achieved its first memory chip tape-out in the first fiscal quarter, Chairman and CEO David Goeckeler said on the company’s analyst call. HBF is designed to complement HBM by bringing NAND-class capacity closer to processors, and samples are planned for delivery in the next calendar year. The company also said BiCS 8 is the mainstay of current production, with BiCS 9 and BiCS 10 in development.

TREE NEWS reports: Anthropic PBC is unlikely to secure an investment-grade credit rating immediately after its US IPO and is instead expected to receive a high-yield, or junk, rating, the Financial Times reported. The classification would place the AI developer among speculative-grade issuers at the outset of its public-market life.

TREE NEWS reports: Blackstone has told investors that Anthropic may not secure an investment-grade credit rating after its IPO, with the AI company expected to receive a “high” junk rating, a departure from earlier guidance. The projection concerns the credit profile the company would carry as a public issuer.

TREE NEWS update: Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman said the company is looking for ways to responsibly fund the massive opportunity it sees ahead so it can do the most for customers. Amazon is working with partners to study how to balance part of its cash flow while expanding aggressively, he said. No specific figures or funding amounts were disclosed.

TREE NEWS update: Amazon has established a supplier financing arrangement allowing it to borrow up to $80 billion against the value of hardware it purchases, with the facility drawable at the company’s discretion from early 2027 through the third quarter of 2028. Lenders will receive security interests in portions of the acquired assets. Amazon’s third-quarter results showed capital expenditure growth exceeding expectations, pushing free cash outflow to $42.4 billion for the year through September 30.

TREE NEWS update: OpenAI said it will release its first report in early 2027. The company said it will work to notify parents if it suspends accounts of teenagers who repeatedly discuss violence, and is partnering with mental health and violence-prevention experts to develop automated methods for earlier intervention when users show signs of violent activity.

TREE NEWS update: European Central Bank Chief Economist Philip Lane said artificial intelligence has only a limited effect on inflation. The assessment from the ECB’s chief economist addresses whether AI-driven changes in productivity and pricing could shift the euro area’s inflation path. Lane did not elaborate on the specific channels or magnitude of that limited impact.

TREE NEWS update: Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco President Mary Daly, a 2027 FOMC voter, said artificial intelligence is crucial to the Fed’s price stability and employment mandates. AI is critical to how the central bank thinks about near- and medium-term policy, Daly said. She did not announce any policy decision or specify a timeline for rate moves.

TREE NEWS reports: Bitcoin miner-turned-AI data center developer Nscale will proceed with its planned listing at a target valuation of $30 billion, Bloomberg reported. The company says it has signed $103 billion in contracts, but as of August 2026 had delivered only 55 megawatts of compute against potential contract demand for 10 gigawatts. Nscale’s data center projects also face delays, safety violations and operational challenges, and Microsoft recently exited one of its UK data center projects.

TREE NEWS reports: Japan is seeking expanded access to AI models from Anthropic and OpenAI, Nikkei reported. The move would deepen the country’s reliance on U.S. frontier AI developers as it pushes to deploy the technology across government and industry. No further terms or timeline were disclosed.