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Cranberry Journal

Friday, October 16, 2026

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At the close · Oct 16

Technology

Top stories in Technology

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  

More in Technology

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

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  

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.

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.

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 person holding a smartphone, its screen lit in a darkened room

What Happens When the Advertiser's Own Agent Joins the Conversation?

Sponsored Agents, announced Wednesday, are brand-funded units that open a labelled conversation with an advertiser's own agent inside ChatGPT, wired to commerce systems so the purchase never leaves the window. Wayfair is a pilot partner. The advertising business reached a $1bn annualised run rate in under 200 days.

By Alison Acosta  

Server racks with dense cabling lit green in a dark room.

The Patch Waited Six Weeks on Half the Servers. The Attackers Waited Four Days.

Wiz says attackers exploited three JFrog Artifactory flaws between 15 August and 8 September, chaining two of them to turn an unauthenticated request into an administrator token. All three had patches. Six weeks after one fix shipped, 59 percent of organisations were still vulnerable. Exploitation of the most serious flaw began four days after it was disclosed.

By Alison Acosta  

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

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  

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

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  

Two graphics cards seen from above on a black surface, one labelled RTX 2080, with their cooling fans visible.

Micron Made $54 Billion in Three Months. The Stock Went Sideways.

Micron Technology reported fiscal fourth-quarter revenue of $54.23 billion, up 379 percent from a year earlier, with a non-GAAP gross margin of 87 percent as AI demand pushed memory prices higher. The shares swung both ways the next day and a week later sat slightly below where they were before the report.

By Cory Chamberlain  

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.

$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 control room lined with monitors and empty operator chairs.

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  

Equipment racks strung with orange and blue patch cables, indicator lights lit.

Eight Hundred Billion a Year Is Not a Boom. It Is a Run Rate.

PwC puts annual data centre capital expenditure at roughly $800bn in 2026, rising toward $1.8 trillion a year by 2050. A boom has a peak somewhere in it. A run rate that roughly doubles over 24 years is a description of infrastructure, and infrastructure is financed, sited and regulated differently.

By Alison Acosta