Business

A report by The Information claims that the world’s biggest chipmaker is considering adding memory back into its portfolio, starting with next-generation 3D DRAM.

For your “is that a bubble popping?” Bingo cards: Bloomberg reports that Microsoft is reconsidering deals to rent server capacity from “neoclouds” to power its AI efforts, and has been turning off rented capacity from Oracle since declining to renew a 2023 deal.

Today I was on the phone with someone who suggested maybe the AI bubble was bursting and that was what was going on with AI stocks. Well, maybe! I don’t know! I’ve seen a lot of attempts to explain why the market was up yesterday and is down today and this is the best one of the bunch.

Emma Walmsley, the former head of biotech company GSK and a member of Microsoft’s board, will take over as HP CEO on January 4th, 2027. Bruce Broussard, who became HP’s interim CEO following Enrique Lores’ departure, will serve as chair of the board.

First, xAI spent $60 billion on Cursor, and now Meta picked up Conductor for an undisclosed amount, as reported previously by Axios, as they all compete with the likes of Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex.

Reuters reports Google employees in Canada, France, Germany, Japan ​and Switzerland started getting buyout offers in June. A Google spokesperson told Reuters it “expanded” the voluntary exit program it offered employees in the US last year, which didn’t include Google Cloud or DeepMind employees.

Anthropic updated its IPO prospectus with full third-quarter earnings, reporting $33.24 billion in revenue through September 30th, up 1,200 percent from last year. It also reported a $104 billion net loss during the same period, mostly from accounting charges. For this quarter alone, Anthropic reports roughly $17 billion in revenue with a net loss of $23.29 billion, plus commitments to spend $895.4 billion “mostly on compute and infrastructure.”

The last time Changpeng Zhao got into a Twitter fight with a guy whose company he was an investor in, FTX went belly up. Anyway, here he is scolding Elon Musk about a grimace emoji in response to the enormous, record-breaking hack of Binance.

“Our newer businesses, ranging from Grocery to Pharmacy to Amazon Leo to Zoox are progressing encouragingly,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says as part of the company’s Q3 earnings report, which revealed total revenue of $201.9 billion. “There has never been a trillion dollar revenue business, and we may have two of them in the next 5-10 years.”

Polymarket said it paused trading “out of an abundance of caution” after one of its third-party partners was “compromised.” Some users reported that their accounts were drained shortly before the stoppage. “We’ll make this right and are fully reimbursing all affected traders,” Polymarket said.

Memory executive Jaejune Kim said in the company’s latest quarterly earnings call that “tight supply conditions” will continue in 2028, driven by demand from AI. As it predicted, Samsung reported record quarterly revenue of 195.3 trillion Korean Won ($146.3 billion), and said its 2027 supply of HBM RAM is already sold out.

Both newsletter platforms have helped host podcasts for a while, and now they’re getting into the money side. Last week Substack announced an early access program for dynamic sponsorship placements, with programmatic ads coming “soon.” Smaller rival Beehiiv followed up yesterday, though has both types of audio ad ready to use right now.

It’s a time frame the company has suggested before. It says a “virtuous cycle” (well, virtuous for memory manufacturers at least) is seeing AI productivity gains lead to increased demand, maintaining pressure on supply even as SK Hynix ramps up production. It’s already signed agreements to sell more than half the RAM it’ll produce through 2028.

This one is for the real finance sickos — what the increased cost of capital for CoreWeave means. Marc Rubenstein, a former hedgie, is fairly granular about CoreWeave’s loans, which is helpful for trying to understand this situation. I came away wondering if Nvidia, which I think is is functionally the central bank for the neoclouds, will decide to bail CoreWeave out, and if so, what that will look like.

According to Reuters’ sources, the FTC was investigating Shein over “delivery delays and other customer complaints,” adding that the settlement would be “equivalent to 44% of Shein’s second-quarter profit.” The European Union also opened an investigation into Shein earlier this year over concerns about “addictive design” features and illegal product listings.

Semafor reports that, along with other investors like board member Laurene Powell Jobs, “Elon Musk has invested roughly $1 billion in Skydance, according to people familiar with the matter, providing a much needed financial injection as the company looks to cut costs and bolster its stock price.

In a deep-dive profile of Marc Andreessen’s petty grievance bullshit, Bloomberg Businessweek gently points out that he is not exactly a member of the reality-based community. Since covid, that’s gotten worse, as he and his wife have cocooned themselves away from ever encountering a normal person.

In January 2024, the label announced a major cost-cutting initiative that is expected to run through 2027. As another round of layoffs is expected, several executives are leaving, including Tunji Balogun, Chairman and CEO of Def Jam Recordings; Nicole Wyskoarko and Sam Riback of Interscope Geffen A&M; Ben Mortimer, President of Polydor Label Group; Rebecca Allen, Chief Artist and Strategy Officer at Universal Music Group UK; and Mark Crossingham, Managing Director of UMG Ireland.

The London Review of Books surveys the gambling landscape: how “prediction markets” have been handed the CFTC, market manipulation, and the blurring of reality. To state the obvious: “Prediction markets don’t produce truth. They are high-stakes wait-and-see machines, that’s all.” Do stay to read the very end.

The chip manufacturer reported a net income of NT$763 billion (about $24 billion) for the quarter, up 69 percent compared to last year, and it’s predicting it’ll do even better in Q4. It’s a good time to make computer chips.