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Cranberry Journal

Thursday, October 15, 2026

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At the close · Oct 15

Technology

Tagged stories

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