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Most important

1. Earnings season laid bare the price of the AI build-out. Alphabet reported negative free cash flow of $9.07B on capex of $51.36B, keeping its full-year capex forecast at $195B–$205B, while Microsoft recorded $10B in revenue from OpenAI in the quarter — nearly 11% of its total — and disclosed Azure revenue of $33.2B in dollars for the first time. Google Cloud revenue doubled to $30.7bn, beating forecasts, even as Search revenue growth slowed to 12%, which Google attributes to lower monetisation in AI Mode.
2. The memory crunch kept breaking records. Samsung reported a record operating profit up 783% to ~$80.5B on AI memory demand, then guided capex ~60% higher to ~$63B in 2026 with HBM capacity sold out through 2027; SK Hynix's profit jumped 632% as it repeated that the shortage will last to 2030. The Wall Street Journal reports surging hyperscaler demand has quintupled flash memory prices, shifting negotiating power from Apple to suppliers like Kioxia, while China's CXMT will make AI memory despite yields as low as 20%.
3. Personal data of 41,000+ US Homeland Security staff leaked. Hackers claiming to have breached DHS's Okta login system leaked the data online, including undercover ICE agents; Bluesky blocked links to the leaked archive, saying it was shared without authorisation. South Korea's financial industry was hit by a fresh wave of cyberattacks in the same window.
4. Apple's touchscreen MacBook Pro is real, and pricey. Apple launched the touchscreen OLED MacBook Pro from $2,899, with hands-ons praising the 2,000-nit PROLED XDR display and MacStories arguing the machine is designed for the iPad generation. Less flattering: some owners of Apple's first foldable phone report cracked screens within hours.
5. Google launched Gemini 4 Carbon for cyber defenders. The model is rolling out through Fairwind at $2/1M input and $10/1M output tokens, rising later — while Google expanded AI Search ads into international markets as core ad growth slows, and opened Gemini and Search to more apps as agents reshape the web.
6. DoorDash is reportedly about to buy Instacart for ~$17B. DoorDash moved its Q3 earnings release forward to before the market opens on 29 October amid the reports — a deal that would pair the two biggest US delivery platforms.
7. Marvell is in advanced talks to buy Lumentum. The data-centre optics maker has a market value of ~$83B, and a deal could be announced as soon as next week — another bet that AI networking, not just GPUs, is where the money pools.
8. The patch-now list grew longer. CISA confirmed attackers are exploiting both PHP2Shell flaws; the critical UEFI firmware flaw leaked early, leaving servers waiting for a fix; GitLab faced an attempted exploitation of CVE-2026-97229; and AWS issued bulletins for a native Brotli decoder RCE (CVE-2026-111497) and a secret-masking bypass in Strands Agents Tools (CVE-2026-115415).
9. AI coding kept swallowing software development. GitHub launched Copilot Fusion as agents start 40% of pull requests; AI coding startup Cognition weighs a funding round valuing it at $70B–$80B; and Anthropic's hiring manager dropping coding interviews because Claude is better at them kept circulating alongside a report that Claude Code sends each background agent's transcript to its model.
10. Anthropic argued courts should be able to block risky AI models. In a letter to Governor Gavin Newsom, Anthropic made the case for judicial blocking powers, while Bloomberg reports it may offer up to 20% of its IPO to retail investors. Separately, US officials believe a Megaspeed executive is a Chinese asset who passed intelligence to Beijing via a close relationship with Jensen Huang.

Other notable stories

• The US Department of Energy loaned $5B to nuclear plants that will power data centres, while the Sierra Club expects US power emissions to hit 2.1B metric tons by 2030, up 42% on 2025, erasing 15 years of cuts.
• Seoul-based AI chip startup FuriosaAI raised a $620M Series D at a $2.9B valuation, with South Korea's National Growth Fund contributing $280M.
• Upwind raised $400M after walking away from a Datadog acquisition offer; Nscale's CEO is proceeding with a US IPO targeting a $30B valuation despite investor pushback.
• Zillow agreed to pay $212.5M to settle an investor class action over its failed home-flipping venture; eBay beat estimates with Q3 revenue up 14% to $3.21B.
• Microsoft's Q1 hardware picture was weaker: Xbox hardware revenue down 14% and Windows OEM and Devices down 22%. Amazon cut up to 250 jobs in its devices unit while debuting an Alexa Photo Frame, Echo Time clock and a camera-equipped Echo Studio.
• Chrome's AI-powered Autofill can now dig through your Gmail to fill out forms; Reddit embraced the 'For You' feed; Xreal's Aura wired glasses powered by Android XR went on sale.
• DeepSeek and Moonshot reportedly trained new models on GPT-6 Astra; Nvidia released an open speech model transcribing 40 languages; Datadog built a specialist AI model for SRE investigations.
• The US DOJ inquired about the impact of Nvidia's Hugging Face deal on AI competition; Meta shareholders sued Zuckerberg to block his non-voting share plan; Bloomberg, Susquehanna and Jump Trading signed up for Truth Social's fast API feed of Trump's posts at $60K–$100K a month.
• US computer science enrolment fell 12%+ for undergraduates this fall as AI reduces coding jobs; the Netherlands plans to cut 25,000 government jobs as it turns to AI; Australia moved to ban AI chatbots from 'emotional intimacy' with children.
• AWS items in the window: Bedrock AgentCore CLI 1.0, Lambda SOCI lazy loading for Managed Instances, EKS Auto Mode support for the Kubernetes Gateway API, ECS Managed Instances consolidation, OpenSearch Serverless time series collections, Lambda durable functions telemetry, RDS for Oracle September 2026 patch, and the security bulletins above.

Hacker News picks

The front page mixed craft with unease: a full-chain Microsoft Edge exploit built from logic bugs only, a functioning deterministic RISC-V CPU running inside Qwen3.5, MicroZig's strict no-LLM/no-AI policy, StackOverflow dropping below 1,000 questions a month, Emacs turning 50, a zero-click silent remote Android denial-of-service, Apple's git still trusting the compromised eMudhra certificates, the case of the 9-bit AES key, and spiders spinning 'silk dope' into nature's toughest material.

Overall theme: Earnings season priced the AI build-out in hard numbers — record profits and revenue on one side, negative free cash flow, sold-out memory and quintupled flash prices on the other — while the DHS leak, PHP2Shell and the UEFI flaw kept security leads busy and Apple bet that touchscreens belong on the Mac after all.

Sources: 268 items from AWS, Cyber, Software Updates, Tech Dev, Tech Leadership and Technology, plus Hacker News, published 28 October 07:00 – 29 October 07:00 Toronto time.