Omni Topic - Tech

Ten days after Nvidia called its CEO's ties to a Megaspeed executive routine, Huang has admitted an affair and the board has opened an independent probe. His apology covers his marriage. The questions facing Nvidia are about information. "I was unfaithful to my wife. My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did." Those are the opening admissions in a memo Jensen Huang sent to Nvidia employees on Sunday, November 8, the same day the company's board said it was launching an independent investigation into reports that its CEO had been targeted by Chinese intelligence. The woman at the center of those reports is Alice Huang, a former executive at Singapore-based AI cloud company Megaspeed. The memo does not name her. The Verge has published the memo in full. Read as a personal apology, it is direct and unhedged. Read as a corporate document, it is notable mostly for what it leaves out. The board is not investigating a marriage. It is invest...

The GPUs Microsoft rented from a rival in 2023 because it could not get enough of them are now the ones it no longer wants. Days earlier, it asked another supplier to rebuild a site for the newest models. Microsoft has been switching off AI computing capacity it rented from Oracle over recent months after deciding not to renew the contract, Bloomberg reported on November 6 in a story carried by Reuters. The move is part of a wider review of cloud partnerships worth billions of dollars. The rented infrastructure runs on previous-generation Nvidia chips, and it reportedly became less useful over time as Microsoft's needs changed. Oracle said demand for its OCI AI infrastructure, older GPUs included, remains strong. Microsoft did not immediately respond to Reuters' request for comment. One expiring lease is small next to the sums both companies are spending on AI. The reason behind it is the interesting part. For most of the past three years, a GPU lease was valued by how muc...

The exchange says the handover was planned months ago. The timing still puts a new name on the accounts paying for the biggest crypto theft on record, backed by recovery figures nobody outside Binance has checked. Binance's chief financial officer, Kaiser Ng, is leaving the exchange, Bloomberg reported and TechCrunch followed up on November 7. Justin Yek will replace him. The news lands nine days after hackers drained $6.3 billion in crypto from Binance wallets on October 29, a loss the company has said it will cover out of its own pocket. In a statement, co-CEO Yi He said Ng was leaving to "pursue a new venture after more than five years at Binance." What that venture is has not been disclosed. Binance says the exit was six months in the making Yi He also said a transition plan had been "implemented over the last half year." Read plainly, that means Ng's departure was settled well before the breach, and nothing made public so far contradicts it. I ha...

Headlines about an “additional” $11 billion overstate what changed. The more telling shift since September is that the fundraising target has dropped while the price has stopped moving. OpenAI has raised $11 billion so far in a funding round that values it at $1.25 trillion, Bloomberg reported on November 6. The round has not closed. A source told Bloomberg it should wrap up in the coming weeks at about $20 billion, well under the $30 billion the company was reported to be seeking in late September. All of these figures come from reporting rather than from OpenAI, and TechCrunch, which relayed the story, was still waiting on a comment from the company when it published. The interesting part is what OpenAI appears willing to give up. Since October 22 the valuation has held at $1.25 trillion, and the size of the raise has absorbed the pressure. For a company planning to list, that is a sensible trade. It also leaves the price resting on a narrower base than the headline number sugges...

Airbnb is telling investors that general-purpose agents can't do the hard part of travel. Its support numbers back part of that claim, but they leave the question of limited supply untouched. Airbnb will start rolling out its own AI travel agent to guests in the first half of 2027, the company said on November 5 alongside its third-quarter results. Until now it had said only to expect the agent sometime in the next year. The product is meant to help people plan a trip and weigh their options before booking, then stay with them once the trip is underway. The date matters less than the argument attached to it. Brian Chesky isn't claiming Airbnb will build a smarter conversationalist than the big AI labs. He is claiming that the company that holds the reservation has an advantage no outside agent can easily copy. That is a stronger position than most vertical AI pitches, though it has a visible hole. The case rests on what happens after booking The shareholder letter opens ...

With no name, price or spec sheet yet, the most concrete thing about the product is how its maker chooses to frame it. That framing is smart, and it sets up a claim the hardware will have to back up. “It has no new screen, and it couldn’t have been an app.” That line is most of what Carl Pei has revealed about Nothing’s first AI device, which he says ships in December. The Nothing CEO posted it on X on November 4 in an essay called “Toolmakers.” The name, price, exact date and specifications remain unannounced, and the teaser image shows a matte dark device with rounded corners and little else. The essay is more revealing than the teaser. Read closely, it presents a work tool that lives alongside the phone, not a consumer gadget meant to replace it. That is a sensible way to lower expectations after a rough few years for AI hardware. It also leaves Nothing with one claim to prove in December: that this needed to be a physical product at all. Nothing's pitch starts at the offic...

Grid hookups take years and big turbines are backordered, so AI builders are generating their own power with rebuilt aircraft engines. They get speed and give up efficiency. The simplest way to understand why AI companies are bolting retired aircraft engines to their data centers is to put two numbers side by side. Connecting 100 megawatts to the grid in Northern Virginia takes about seven years, according to the International Energy Agency. A jet engine rebuilt to burn natural gas can have a data center running in 24 months, according to Rystad Energy analyst Audun Martinsen. The New York Times laid out the trend on November 3, 2026, and the gap between those two figures explains nearly all of it. My read is that this is less a story about jet engines than about what has become scarce. For most of the AI build-out, the constraint people talked about was chips. Increasingly it is the date on which electricity actually arrives at a site, and companies are now willing to pay in effic...