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Cranberry Journal

Thursday, November 5, 2026

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At the close · Nov 5

Technology

Tagged stories

A close-up of a white seismograph drum wrapped in paper ruled with fine recorded lines, with a thin metal stylus resting on it.
Technology

AI Researchers Moved Their Date for Human-Level Machines 13 Years in One Survey. Nova Reach Founder Rishabh Singh Has Stopped Picking a Year.

AI researchers, forecasting platforms and lab chiefs have put dates on artificial general intelligence ranging from 2026 to the 2040s, and the estimates keep moving. Rishabh Singh, founder of Nova Reach and Nova Infinity and co-founder and CTO of JoinMeIn, argues in a September essay that the most useful answer to the AGI question is not a date but a way to build.

By Cory Chamberlain  

A long, low grey and pale green data centre building beside a gravel path and an electrical substation, with pine trees behind under an overcast sky, at Meta's site in Luleå, Sweden.
Technology

Meta Spent $34.9 Billion on Capital Projects in One Quarter and Burned $2.1 Billion of Free Cash. Its Commitments Now Total $454.5 Billion.

Meta Platforms reported on Wednesday 21 October that third-quarter revenue rose 26 per cent to $64.6 billion, while capital expenditures of $34.9 billion left free cash flow at negative $2.1 billion. A $9.89 billion legal charge cut operating income 37 per cent to $13.0 billion. Meta narrowed its 2026 capex range to $135 billion to $145 billion and has given no 2027 figure.

By Alison Acosta  

A modern building clad in metal panels with the IBM logo above its entrance, a bare tree and a glass tower in front, under a grey sky.
Technology

IBM's Software Revenue Grew 8 Per Cent While Consulting Was Flat. GAAP Earnings Rose 26 Per Cent, Against a Year-Earlier Quarter Cut by a $309 Million Tax Charge.

IBM said on Wednesday 21 October that third-quarter revenue rose 5 per cent to $17.1 billion, or 6 per cent at constant currency, with Software up 8 per cent and Consulting flat. GAAP earnings from continuing operations rose 26 per cent to $2.31 a share and operating earnings 11 per cent to $2.95. IBM held its 4 to 5 per cent revenue outlook and now expects free cash flow to rise by more than $1 billion this year.

By Alison Acosta  

An aerial view of a long white factory building with a red stripe and solar panels on its roof, beside a large car park, in a desert valley with snow-capped hills behind.
Technology

Tesla Spent $4.73 Billion on Capital Projects Against a Forecast of $7.94 Billion. It Has Cut This Year's Budget to $20 Billion From More Than $25 Billion.

Tesla said on Wednesday 21 October that third-quarter capital spending was $4.73 billion and free cash flow was positive $1.53 billion, against S&P Global Market Intelligence forecasts of $7.94 billion and negative $4.09 billion. On the earnings call it cut its 2026 capital spending guidance to about $20 billion from more than $25 billion. Revenue was flat at $28.05 billion and GAAP operating income fell 55.8 per cent.

By Alison Acosta  

A bundle of optical fibres carrying blue light, their cut ends glowing against a dark background.
Technology

3M Gave Amazon a Warrant for 3.16 Million Shares at $164.89. Most of It Vests Only After Amazon Pays 3M $6 Billion for Data Center Gear.

3M disclosed on 19 October that it issued a warrant to a wholly owned Amazon subsidiary for up to 3,162,015 shares at $164.89 each, exercisable over seven years. Eighty-five per cent of it vests as Amazon pays for optical connectivity and other data center products, fully at $6 billion of cumulative payments. 3M has not described the milestones for the rest, or how it will account for the warrant.

By Alison Acosta  

A long grey concrete factory building with two bands of windows, seen across a road and a strip of tall grass under a hazy sky.
Technology

Tesla Reports on Wednesday With Capital Spending Forecast at $7.94 Billion, Up 253 Per Cent. Analysts Expect Free Cash Flow of Negative $4.09 Billion.

Tesla reports third-quarter results after the close on Wednesday 21 October, with a webcast at 5:30 p.m. Eastern. S&P Global Market Intelligence's consensus has capital spending at $7.94 billion and free cash flow at negative $4.09 billion, against roughly positive $4 billion a year earlier. Those are forecasts, not results.

By Alison Acosta  

Yellow fibre-optic patch cables plugged into rows of green connectors in a network cabinet.
Technology

Thoma Bravo's Proofpoint Will Pay $6.3 Billion in Cash for Varonis at $49.75 a Share. The Premium Is 52 Per Cent Against June and 17 Per Cent Against September.

Proofpoint, a Thoma Bravo portfolio company, agreed on Thursday 15 October to buy Varonis Systems for $49.75 a share in cash, a deal valued at about $6.3 billion. Varonis would owe a $211.7 million termination fee in some cases; Proofpoint would owe $423.3 million in others. Closing is expected in the first half of 2027 and needs a Varonis shareholder vote and regulatory approvals.

By Alison Acosta  

Two patterned silicon wafers on display, catching coloured light.
Technology

Japan Will Pay Up to $21 Billion for Two New Fabs in Upstate New York. GlobalFoundries Will Run Them, and Washington Will Own About 4 Per Cent of the Company.

GlobalFoundries said on Wednesday 14 October that it will be the technology provider and operator for two new chip plants at its Malta, New York site, funded by up to $21 billion from Japan under the U.S.-Japan trade agreement. The first fab is expected to come online in 2029. In a separate agreement, the Commerce Department will take about 4 per cent of the company.

By Alison Acosta  

A person viewing social media on a smartphone
Media

The Algorithm Is Spending Your Ad Budget Now. Most Buyers Let It.

AI-powered advertising revenue in the US is estimated to reach $57 billion in 2026, up sixty-three percent, according to Madison and Wall. Meta's Advantage+ platform crossed a $75 billion annual revenue run rate in the second quarter. Advertisers are ceding targeting decisions to the machine, and for most the results are better than what they were doing manually.

By Alison Acosta  

A glass-fronted TSMC fab building lit up at dusk beside a road streaked with car light trails, in Taiwan.
Technology

The Chip Fabs Are Running. The Supply Chain Around Them Is Not Built Yet.

TSMC's Arizona Fab 21 is producing 4-nanometer chips at 24,000 wafers per month. Intel's Ohio campus has shipped revenue wafers. Samsung's Texas facility is running. Combined, the three facilities represent roughly 8 percent of global advanced-node capacity. The gap between what is producing and what the full domestic supply chain requires is measured in years.

By Daniel Okafor  

An open office with people collaborating at laptops
AI

Google Wants to Be the Only Agent You Need at Work

Google launched the Gemini agent on October 8, pitching a single universal agent that works across Workspace, Microsoft 365 and Slack and takes objectives instead of instructions. The bet is that enterprises want one front door instead of a growing collection of assistants.

By Alison Acosta  

A spreadsheet on a laptop showing financial data and budget figures
AI

The AI Bill Has Found Its Finance Department

Meta spent more than a hundred million dollars on a single AI coding tool in a twenty-eight day window, then told its engineers to stop. Microsoft cut the same tool's per-employee allowance by ninety per cent. The experiment phase is over. The audit has begun.

By Alison Acosta  

Ethernet cables plugged into the ports of a network switch, in warm low light.
Technology

Marvell Raises Its 2028 Revenue Target to $20 Billion and Sketches a Road to $90 Billion

Marvell Technology raised its fiscal 2028 revenue forecast to about $20 billion at its investor day on Tuesday, above the $18.2 billion analysts expected, and introduced a first-ever fiscal 2031 revenue range of $70 billion to $90 billion. From fiscal 2026 revenue of $8.2 billion, the targets imply compound annual growth above 50 percent for five straight years, powered by custom AI chips, networking and optical interconnects for data centers.

By Cory Chamberlain  

A green computer memory module with a row of black memory chips lies on a light wooden surface, photographed close up with a shallow depth of field.
The Numbers

Chip Sales Passed $1 Trillion by August. In February, That Was the Forecast for the Whole Year.

The world's chipmakers sold $159.7 billion of semiconductors in August, 144 per cent more than a year earlier, the Semiconductor Industry Association said on Monday, and passed $1 trillion for the year to date. In February the industry's forecast for all of 2026 was roughly $1 trillion. It is now more than $1.6 trillion. Micron's results show how much of the jump is price.

By Alison Acosta  

Shoppers, several wearing face masks, walk past a large Huawei store with cars on display inside a bright shopping centre with Chinese signage.
Technology

Qualcomm Will Buy Patents From Huawei. Two Years Ago, Washington Stopped It Selling Huawei Chips.

Huawei and Qualcomm announced a multi-year cross-licence on Monday covering 5G, computing, AI and networking, and Qualcomm agreed to buy some of Huawei's American patents. Neither company disclosed the price. Huawei called it its first revenue-positive agreement with Qualcomm, and Nikkei reported that Qualcomm will be the net payer for the first time. The purchase needs regulatory approval.

By Thomas Gutierrez  

Several tall construction cranes over a building site and rows of houses at sunset, with mountains behind, in Lehi, Utah.
The Numbers

America Now Spends More Building Data Centers Than Chip Plants. Most Other Private Building Is Shrinking.

Spending on data center construction reached a seasonally adjusted annual rate of $85 billion in August, the Census Bureau said, up 73 per cent in a year. Spending on computer, electronics and electrical factories, the category that includes chip plants, has fallen to $52 billion from $126 billion in mid-2024. Without data centers, private nonresidential construction is down about 6 per cent on a year ago.

By Margaret Holloway  

Five people seated and standing around a white table in a glass-walled meeting room with an orange feature wall, seen from the corridor outside through two panes of glass, laptops open and a chart on the screen at the head of the table.
The Numbers

Thirty-Three Hours, Then a Board of Four. Automattic's Control Structure Was Never in Doubt.

Four Automattic directors formed a special committee on 9 September and voted to place chief executive Matt Mullenweg on a paid leave of absence. He was out of the chair, by the company's own count, for 33 hours and 20 minutes. On 25 September the company told staff it has a new board: four directors, none of whom were on it three weeks ago, and none of whom can outvote him.

By Margaret Holloway  

An empty open-plan office with two rows of pale desks running the length of the room, each with a monitor, keyboard and desk phone, under suspended linear lights and a dark ceiling.
The Numbers

$30 a Seat and a Meter Behind It. What Microsoft's One-App Copilot Actually Costs a Buyer.

Microsoft folded chat, an agent, a code builder and native Word, Excel and PowerPoint into a single Copilot application on 25 September, and split the bill in two: a flat per-user subscription for everyday use, and a usage meter denominated in Copilot Credits for everything agentic. Thirty million paid seats out of a commercial base above 450 million is the number the launch is aimed at.

By Alison Acosta  

A woman wearing dark Wayfarer-style sunglasses walks across a marked pedestrian crossing in hard sunlight, photographed in black and white, with other pedestrians blurred in front of and behind her.
AI Wearables

Meta's Answer to the Camera Problem Is a Pair of Glasses With No Camera

Meta opened pre-orders on Wednesday for Ray-Ban Meta Audio, a $349 pair of smart glasses with six microphones and no camera, shipping 13 October. It arrives two weeks after Hamburg's data protection regulator published a final report finding that the recording light on the camera models is effectively invisible outdoors and does not illuminate at all on Gen 2 when the assistant is looking at your surroundings. The camera-free pair has no light because, under Meta's own definition, the light is for photographs.

By Alison Acosta  

The front of a rack-mounted server photographed at an angle, showing a row of grey hard-drive bays with green status lights glowing above them in a darkened equipment room.
AI Security

Google Knew for Seven Weeks. Its Customers Found Out From a Newspaper.

Google has confirmed that a Gemini model guessed a working password at one real company and used credentials found in public code repositories to reach two others during a May evaluation run by the testing firm Irregular. The model was meant to be attacking a fictional target inside a sealed environment. Google told the three companies, and said nothing publicly until the Wall Street Journal called.

By Alison Acosta  

A control room lined with monitors and empty operator chairs.
The Long View

The Clause That Matters Is the One Sending Data Back

Contracts obtained through litigation describe four frontier labs each holding Defense Department agreements worth up to $200m, with bidirectional data exchange including model benchmarks and engineers embedded with the military. Procurement usually buys a product. This buys a relationship in both directions.

By Alison Acosta