October 19, 2025: Beware The Chop

Last week, Dow Jones rose 1.6%, S&P 500 gained 1.7%, Nasdaq composite was up 2.1%. The majority of gains came Monday, which was a partial recovery from the previous Friday’s ugly sell-off. Headline moves masked volatility arising from headlines pertaining to US tariffs, regional banks/private credit concerns, US federal government shutdown, and AI margin questions. The continuing U.S. government shutdown has compressed the viable remaining 2025 IPO window to roughly four weeks into year-end. That said, Strava signaled an intent to list, along with a few other names. 54% of fund managers called AI stocks a bubble, according to a recent survey. An “investment surge” in artificial intelligence has helped the US avoid a sharp slowdown but risks stoking inflation, the IMF’s chief economist has warned, as the fund upgraded its outlook for the world’s largest economy. Quantum names ripped after JP Morgan earmarked US$10 billion for “frontier tech.” OpenAI announced a new chip design deal with Broadcom, the latest in a succession of announcements by OpenAI to assure itself of more computing capacity. Oracle raised its FY30 AI Cloud revenue and GPU rental target margins, despite near term skepticism. Meta will finance a Louisiana Data Center via ~US$27 billion SPV debt. Google will “backstop” TeraWulf Data Center bonds. A group of investors including BlackRock and Abu Dhabi’s MGX acquired Aligned Data Centers in a roughly US$40 billion deal, the latest big investment in companies building data centers for the tech giants. In Canada, Dominion Dynamics secured $4 million pre-seed round to build an Arctic multi-domain sensor fabric, supported by a high-caliber Canadian advisory bench. In news pertaining to Sophic Clients, Plurilock announced a $3.0 million non-brokered 10% convertible debenture with warrants (convert $0.23, warrants $0.25, 3-yr), to scale Critical Services, international expansion, and progress toward profitability.

Sophic Client Plurilock (PLUR-TSXV, PLCKF-OTCQB) announces successful Committed Offering of $3 million strategic investment to accelerate growth.

Plurilock announces that, subject to the approval of the TSX Venture Exchange (the “TSXV”), it intends to complete a non-brokered private placement (the “Offering”) of $3,000,000 through the issuance of 10% unsecured convertible debenture units (the “Debentures”) with a strategic investor (the “Investor”). The Debenture is comprised of 3,000, $1,000 convertible debentures, convertible at the option of the holder at a price of $0.23 for a period of three years from the date of issue and 4,000 common share purchase warrants exercisable at a price of $0.25 for a period of three years from the date of issue. The total number of common shares issuable upon conversion of the Debenture is 13,043,478 common shares and an additional 12,000,000 common shares issuable upon exercise of the warrants. The Debentures will bear interest at a rate of 10% per annum, which is payable in common shares at the election of the Company based on the 10-day VWAP at the time of the interest payment, subject to the policies of the TSXV. The proceeds from the Offering will be used to accelerate Plurilock’s growth initiatives, expand its Critical Services business, and strengthen working capital. “This strategic investment provides growth capital from a long-term partner who understands our market and mission,” said Ian L. Paterson, CEO of Plurilock. “It allows us to accelerate execution on key growth priorities, including expanding our Critical Services offerings, scaling internationally, and driving towards profitability.” The Debenture is subject to customary closing conditions. All securities issued under the Offering will be subject to a four-month and one-day statutory hold period from the date of issuance, in accordance with applicable securities laws. https://tinyurl.com/yjdhwchf

Record number of participants deployed Sophic Client Kraken Robotics (PNG-TSXV, KRKNF-OTC)’ Synthetic Aperture Sonar at REPMUS 2025.

Kraken Robotics Inc. announces that a record number of participants used its synthetic aperture sonar (SAS) technology at the annual Robotic Experimentation and Prototyping with Maritime Unmanned Systems (REPMUS) exercise in Portugal. Seven international naval teams and three uncrewed underwater vehicle (UUV) manufacturers deployed Kraken SAS for maritime security exercise applications including mine countermeasure operations and critical underwater infrastructure inspection, demonstrating interoperability across platforms, nations, and mission objectives in the underwater domain. “This year we saw Kraken SAS usage at REPMUS double compared to last year, with ten teams leveraging Kraken systems,” said Greg Reid, President and CEO of Kraken Robotics. “Hands-on operational trials like REPMUS are invaluable—they let us collaborate with operators under real conditions so we can refine product roadmaps and continue to deliver the best solutions for tomorrow’s missions.” This marks Kraken’s fourth consecutive year supporting REPMUS, with an increasing number of participants using Kraken SAS each year, from one in 2022 to 10 in 2025. This year, Kraken SAS was integrated across four different types of UUVs, from small-class to large-class. Kraken personnel provided shore-side integration and data support, collaborating with users on best practices for efficient and accurate operations. Systems captured data at a constant 3 cm x 3 cm resolution, revealing mine-like objects and subsea cables as small as 5 cm diameter. The 2025 REPMUS exercise brought together more than 30 nations, 2000 participants, and 250 autonomous assets to test naval interoperability in realistic operational environments. Watch a video summary of Kraken’s participation at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yyr6E6jHsec. https://tinyurl.com/3t5kn6j3

Provision raises US$7 million to build AI co-pilots for pre-construction estimates.

The Toronto-based construction technology startup has secured US$7 million ($9.8 million) in seed funding to develop its AI co-pilot, which helps construction estimators find information and identify risks and opportunities based on project documents. The round, which closed in August, was led by Cercano Management with support from fellow new backer Jamie McDonald of Black & McDonald, as well as existing investors Y Combinator and One Way Ventures. It brings Provision’s total funding to US$8.7 million. https://tinyurl.com/mry3kfma

Dominion Dynamics secures $4 million to modernize Arctic surveillance.

Ottawa-based Dominion Dynamics is making the most of Canada’s defence tech surge as it secures $4 million in pre-seed funding. The pre-seed was raised on a simple agreement for future equity (SAFE) and backed almost exclusively by Canadian investors, with participation from Golden Ventures, Garage Capital, Afore Capital, Side Door Ventures, and strategic angel investors. While Afore and Side Door are American firms, the partners that led their investment are Canadian, Dominion founder Eliot Pence told BetaKit. The only two American investors in the round, Pence’s family and friends, contributed less than $50,000, he added. While Canadian pre-seed investment activity has continued to slump this year, Dominion raised its funding within five months of its June founding. The company intends to raise another round of funding to grow its headcount from below 10 employees to around 40 by the end of Q1 2026, Dominion COO Mitch Carkner told BetaKit last month. Dominion Dynamics’ platform connects off-the-shelf sensors across land, sea, air, and space into a data fabric for coordination and data sharing across allied networks. The company is focused on the Arctic, where melting ice has revealed alluring new trading routes that place Canada’s continued control over the region into question. Last month, Dominion struck a three-year partnership with the Arctic Training Centre in Whitehorse to develop and test its systems in the “extreme” environment. On top of its Canadian cap table, Dominion’s advisory board is filled with notable Canadians. Former Conservative Party leader Erin O’Toole chairs the advisory board. He is joined by a former chief of the Defence Staff, General Wayne Eyre; a former vice-chief of the Defence Staff, Lieutenant-General Mike Rouleau; and former PSP Investments CEO Neil Cunningham. https://tinyurl.com/y3zsjyf9

Lyft to hire hundreds more staff in Toronto amid plans to open new tech hub.

A Lyft spokesperson told BetaKit the company has “a few hundred” employees in Toronto and is looking to scale that to “several hundred” with the new hub. Toronto will become Lyft’s second-largest North American tech hub after its San Francisco headquarters, the spokesperson added. Lyft’s Toronto office will come as Lyft sees an increase in its Canadian business, with rides in the country growing by more than 20 percent year-over-year in the first half of 2025. https://tinyurl.com/w5wcfbnj

US IPO candidates have four weeks to pick from as shutdown drags.

The opportunities to go public on US exchanges by the end of the year have been sharply narrowed by the federal government shutdown, holidays and financial reporting rules, leaving companies facing tough decisions. “There’s about four weeks that are viable,” said Jill Ford, Wells Fargo & Co.’s co-head of equity capital markets. “Two before Thanksgiving, two after Thanksgiving, assuming the new issue markets shut for the last two weeks of December.” So far, only Navan Inc., Beta Technologies Inc., MapLight Therapeutics Inc. and Exzeo Group Inc. are pushing ahead with sizable deals rather than wait for the shutdown to end. With the US Securities and Exchange’s initial public offering activity on hold, that means they have to set the terms of their IPO 20 days before they go public, rather than the more typical marketing period of seven days. The lengthy wait has candidates and their advisers frantically scouring the calendar, looking at starting and finishing dates for 20-day windows and tallying up all the things that could pressure them to refile and start the clock over. The shutdown, which has already eaten into hopes for a busy October, is not the only obstacle for companies weighing listings. Firms going public using their second-quarter results in their filings, and whose fiscal year matches the calendar year, have until Nov. 12 before they are deemed stale. The need for a fresh audit could push debuts past the Thanksgiving federal holiday and into early December. https://tinyurl.com/2msvhmw7

Strava eyes IPO as Gen Z trades dating apps for running clubs.

Strava, the 16-year-old fitness-tracking app, is gearing up to go public, the Financial Times reports. CEO Michael Martin told the FT that the San Francisco company plans to list “at some point,” eyeing capital for more acquisitions. The company, backed by Sequoia Capital, TCV, and Jackson Square Ventures, was last valued at US$2.2 billion in May. Strava has the wind at its back, certainly. The app’s user base has exploded to 50 million monthly active users in 2025, according to Sensor Tower — nearly double its closest competitor, with downloads up 80% year-over-year. Strava’s growth coincides with a cultural shift around running, particularly as people in their teens and 20s seek more alcohol-free ways to socialize. Runners also emphasize the mental health benefits of finding support networks (and, sometimes, romance). Applications for the 2026 London Marathon jumped 31% this year to 1.1 million people. Strava’s secret sauce? Turning workouts into social currency with “kudos” and split comparisons. Sensor Tower estimates consumers spent over US$180 million on its subscription tier through September — a figure Strava says significantly underestimates actual revenue. The company also earns from sponsored challenges and brand partnerships. https://tinyurl.com/w8f4rxpz

Electric aircraft startup Beta Technologies seeks to raise US$825 million in IPO.

Electric aviation startup Beta Technologies has priced shares for its initial public offering between US$27 and US$33, in hopes of raising as much as US$825 million, according to a regulatory document filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. If the company attracts investors at the top of that range it will debut with a valuation of about US$7.2 billion. The Vermont-based company, which was founded in 2017 by its enigmatic CEO Kyle Clark, filed the paperwork Wednesday despite the government shutdown. The SEC issued guidance earlier this month that allows companies in IPO limbo to allow their statements on certain areas, including share price, to become automatically effective after 20 days, even without SEC staff review. Several other companies, including Navan, have pressed ahead with IPO plans under this rule. https://tinyurl.com/4m6w4szw

Japan’s Rakuten weighing US IPO of credit card business.

Japanese e-commerce and finance heavyweight Rakuten is weighing an initial public offering in the United States of its credit card business, according to two sources familiar with the matter. Rakuten began considering a potential U.S. listing of one of Japan’s largest credit card businesses last month, the sources said. The considerations are in the early stages, with other potential options including a stake sale to a strategic buyer, one of the sources said. One trigger for considering a U.S. IPO of Rakuten Card was rival SoftBank’s plans to list app pay operator PayPay in the U.S., the source said. The sources declined to be named as the information is not public. Rakuten, which is led by founder and CEO Hiroshi Mikitani, shook up Japan’s finance sector by simplifying the process for applying for credit cards and making them available to a wider range of consumers. Rakuten Card has issued more than 30 million credit cards in Japan. Non-GAAP operating profit at the business grew 20% to 62 billion yen last year but fell 4.5% in the April-June quarter of this year compared to the same period a year earlier due to higher costs. Rakuten Card aims to expand profit to 100 billion yen over the medium term and is looking to expand its business with corporate customers, its CEO Koichi Nakamura said in March. https://tinyurl.com/bdtajhkv

Most investors say AI stocks are in a bubble, BofA poll shows.

A record share of global fund managers said artificial intelligence stocks are in a bubble following a torrid rally this year, according to a survey by Bank of America Corp. About 54% of participants in the October poll indicated tech stocks were looking too expensive, an about-turn from last month when nearly half had dismissed those concerns. Fears that global stocks were overvalued also hit a peak in the latest survey. US stocks have scaled multiple records, driven by enthusiasm around AI spending and related productivity benefits. The tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 has rallied 18% this year, lifting its forward price-to-earnings ratio to nearly 28, above an average of 23 over the past decade. Fund managers’ equity allocation also reflects some optimism. The BofA survey showed exposure to US stocks rose to the highest in eight months — stretching back to before tariff anxieties took hold. Worries about a recession subsided to the lowest since early 2022. The BofA survey showed an AI bubble was viewed as the biggest tail risk, followed by a resurgence in inflation and worries about the loss of Federal Reserve independence and dollar debasement. The poll was conducted between Oct. 3 and Oct. 9, and canvassed 166 participants with US$400 billion in assets. https://tinyurl.com/pnkwe6j7

AI investment boom shielding US from sharp slowdown, says IMF.

An “investment surge” in artificial intelligence has helped the US avoid a sharp slowdown but risks stoking inflation, the IMF’s chief economist has warned, as the fund upgraded its outlook for the world’s largest economy. The IMF on Tuesday delivered more optimistic forecasts for both global growth and the US economy despite bleak predictions earlier this year that Donald Trump’s trade war risked plunging the world into a “significant slowdown”. As finance officials gather in Washington for the IMF’s annual meetings, the fund lifted its 2025 global growth projection by 0.2 percentage points compared to its last estimate in July, predicting world GDP will rise by 3.2 per cent this year, only slightly shy of 2024’s 3.3 per cent figure. Global growth is forecast to be 3.1 per cent in 2026. The US would expand by 2 per cent this year and 2.1 per cent in 2026, the fund said. That marks a slowdown from 2.8 per cent in 2024 but it is by far the strongest growth rate for any of the G7 leading economies and a slight upgrade from July’s forecast. In April, the fund had said US growth would slow to 1.8 per cent this year. IMF economist Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas said a big reason for the surprising strength of the US economy was “a very significant AI-related, tech-related investment surge” that was helping to ease financial conditions and creating wealth gains for US shoppers. Tech stocks — including Nvidia, Broadcom and Oracle — have surged this year, carrying US equity markets to a series of record highs despite simmering concerns about when some companies will see a return on their vast outlays on AI. The rally has also led to warnings that global stock markets are at risk of a sudden correction if market sentiment about potential productivity gains from AI turns. “We are not yet at the levels of the surge investment that we saw in the dotcom boom, we’re not yet at the level of stretched valuations in equity markets,” Gourinchas said. “But we’re maybe half, or two-thirds of the way there.” https://tinyurl.com/yvhmscn6

Oracle raises AI Cloud revenue projection, struggles to profit from older Nvidia chips.

Oracle has struggled to generate gross profit margins higher than 25% from renting out one- to two-year old Nvidia server chips to artificial intelligence developers. The previously unreported data show Oracle has a wide gap to fill to reach what co-CEO Clay Magouyrk said Thursday would be 30% to 40% gross margins from the AI cloud business in the coming years. The company also increased its revenue projection for its cloud business in fiscal 2030 to an astounding US$166 billion, up 15% from a projection it made a month ago. The company is reinventing itself as a cloud provider, and its margin projections suggest it will find ways to lower the cost of chips it buys from Nvidia or will be able to charge customers such as OpenAI more to rent the chips. Internal data also show the company is losing money on rentals of the newest Nvidia chips, Blackwell, as well as on chips from AMD that came out last year, the report said. https://tinyurl.com/ybu89233

OpenAI announces chip design deal with Broadcom.

OpenAI is to design its own AI chips in collaboration with Broadcom, the two companies announced on Monday morning, the latest in a succession of announcements by OpenAI to assure itself of more computing capacity. The agreement with Broadcom follows deals announced in the past two weeks with Nvidia and AMD for supply of those companies’ chips. But in this deal, OpenAI is designing its own chips. In today’s announcement, OpenAI said it “can embed what it’s learned from developing frontier models and products directly into the hardware.” In September, the Financial Times reported that OpenAI was the mystery customer CEO Hock Tan was referring to when he said Broadcom would make US$10 billion next year on a new AI chip deal. But on Monday, in an interview on CNBC with OpenAI cofounder Greg Brockman, Broadcom President Charlie Kawwas implied that OpenAI was not the company behind that deal. “I would love to take a US$10 billion [purchase order] from my good friend Greg. He has not given me that PO yet, so I hope that answers the question,” he said. https://tinyurl.com/9j2z649f

Walmart announces it will sell products through ChatGPT’s instant Checkout.

Walmart said Tuesday that it would soon start selling products through ChatGPT’s Instant Checkout feature, marking the first major retailer to strike an e-commerce partnership with the AI firm. Shoppers will be able to buy most Walmart and Sam’s Club products directly in ChatGPT conversations, including items from Walmart’s third-party marketplace, Daniel Danker, Walmart’s executive vice president of AI, product and design, said in an interview with Bloomberg, though fresh food won’t be available via the feature. OpenAI last month announced the launch of Instant Checkout, starting with merchants who sell on Etsy or who use Shopify software. Walmart executives said earlier this year they wanted to keep Walmart’s e-commerce technology open-ended so that the retailer could pursue partnerships with AI companies. https://tinyurl.com/c344e592

Salesforce touts deeper ties with OpenAI, Anthropic.

Salesforce CEO and co-founder Marc Benioff, speaking at Salesforce’s annual Dreamforce conference, announced expansions of existing partnerships with OpenAI and Anthropic aimed at making it easier for customers to build agents using those startups’ models. In doing so, Benioff made clear that Salesforce is on good terms with OpenAI again. While OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman joined Benioff onstage at Dreamforce in 2023 to announce their partnership, OpenAI representatives were nowhere to be found at last year’s conference, where Benioff said many of his customers were having trouble getting OpenAI models to produce accurate results. This year, Brad Lightcap, OpenAI’s chief operating officer, made a brief appearance during the Dreamforce keynote. And the companies revealed deeper integrations between their products, which will soon let ChatGPT users pull up Salesforce customer records and build charts and graphs using simple text prompts. Salesforce customers will also be able to access Anthropic’s Claude models in a more secure way than they’ve been able to do previously. Salesforce has had a tough time getting customers to buy its main AI product, Agentforce. But teaming up with OpenAI and Anthropic at least shows customers that Salesforce is close to where the action is happening in AI. While Benioff would likely prefer not to share the spotlight for his AI products, the association could convince customers that Salesforce is on the right track. https://tinyurl.com/bddme77a

Anthropic nears US$7 billion in Annualized revenue.

Anthropic is nearing US$7 billion in annualized revenue this month, according to a company spokesperson. That’s up from around US$5 billion in July. The maker of Claude has also projected annualized revenue will climbed to US$9 billion by year-end and between US$20 billion to US$26 billion in annualized revenue by the end of 2026, according to Reuters. The projections appear higher than those Anthropic gave investors earlier this year. The maker of the Claude chatbot said it expected to generate between roughly US$2 billion and US$4 billion in revenue this year and between about US$5 billion and US$12 billion in total revenue in 2026. Annualized revenue, a measure of the last month’s revenue multiplied by 12, tends to be higher than aggregate revenue. Its latest projections for total revenue couldn’t be learned. A spokesperson declined to comment on the projections. Anthropic raised $13 billion in September at a US$170 billion valuation before the investment. VC firm Iconiq, along with Lightspeed Venture Partners and Fidelity Management, co-led the round. https://tinyurl.com/y8uuec6p

Oracle and AMD strike new AI chip pact.

Oracle said Tuesday it will be the first cloud provider to offer a large cluster of Advanced Micro Devices’ next-generation artificial intelligence server chips next fall. The deal involves 50,000 of the AMD chips, MI450 graphics processing units, the companies said. It isn’t clear how much data center power capacity that cluster would require, but it is likely to be a small fraction of a gigawatt. Last week OpenAI said it would eventually use 6 GW of AMD AI chips to power its technology, and that those chips could be run in cloud providers like Oracle that rent out servers to the ChatGPT maker. (OpenAI will use a little more than 2 GW of capacity from cloud providers like Microsoft, Google and Oracle as of the end of this year.) For such cloud providers and for customers like OpenAI, using AMD could eventually help them negotiate better prices with Nvidia, which dominates the market for AI chips; prices for those chips make it hard for Oracle to generate a profit from renting them out to customers like OpenAI. Nearly all of Oracle’s AI server rental revenue comes from Nvidia chip-powered servers. OpenAI’s recent deal with AMD could result in the AI developer owning 10% of the chip designer. At the same time, OpenAI is already one of the world’s biggest users of Nvidia GPUs and said it plans to oversee its own data centers filled with Nvidia chips. https://tinyurl.com/yfu8c67c

Meta and Arm announce new partnership.

Meta Platforms and semiconductor company Arm on Wednesday announced a partnership where Meta will use Arm’s data center platforms to power the ranking and recommendation systems for its social media apps, according to a blog post. The announcement comes after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg last month said his company planned to spend “something like at least US$600 billion” through 2028 on data centers and other infrastructure in the U.S. Over the past year, Meta has ramped up its capital expenditures as it expands its computing capacity for its artificial intelligence efforts. https://tinyurl.com/468rxem4

Meta entity sells US$27 billion in debt for Louisiana data center.

An entity being used to fund Meta Platforms’ large-scale data center in Louisiana sold more than $27 billion in debt with an interest rate about 2.25 percentage points above the U.S. Treasury yield. Meta is raising the debt, maturing in 2049, for a roughly US$30 billion special-purpose vehicle the company is using to fund the construction of a data center called Hyperion, which could eventually use as much as five gigawatts of power. Bond giant PIMCO is leading the offering, which is being sold to a wider group of investors with the help of Morgan Stanley. Lenders to the SPV will get a roughly 6.8% interest rate, based on the current 30-year Treasury yield. Meta’s publicly-traded bonds maturing in 2054 carry yields of about 5.4%. Meta will share ownership of the SPV with investment firm Blue Owl, an arrangement that is designed to shift the costs of building the data center off the company’s balance sheet. A Meta spokesperson didn’t respond to a request for comment on the bond pricing, which was first reported by Bloomberg. https://tinyurl.com/4shra9eu

‘Google Backstop’ adds new twist to data center financing frenzy.

Alphabet Inc.-owned Google’s novel support on a US$3.2 billion debt transaction for TeraWulf Inc.’s data center build-out has introduced a new tool to the burgeoning world of financing for artificial intelligence-linked infrastructure, and investors are champing at the bit to get a piece of the deal. Orders for the junk-bond sale were north of US$10 billion, with investors latching onto the so-called “Google backstop” for TeraWulf’s financing, according to people familiar with the matter. The debt has been rated Ba2 and BB by Moody’s Ratings and Fitch Ratings, respectively, at the high end of junk territory. Google’s support for the bond kicks in once the data center, located in Barker, New York, is operational and AI cloud platform Fluidstack begins its lease there, according to TeraWulf’s offering memorandum to bond investors seen by Bloomberg News. Google will step in to repay creditors if Fluidstack defaults or goes bankrupt, and is taking a roughly 14% pro forma equity stake in TeraWulf as part of the deal. Morgan Stanley is leading the effort, labeled as a green bond, and is offering the debt to investors at a yield of 7.75%, much higher than the average yield of 5.71% for similarly-rated debt, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The transaction is Terawulf’s first junk bond following an US$850 million convertible debt deal in August. https://tinyurl.com/28wmu4pc

BlackRock-led group makes US$40 billion data center acquisition.

A group of investors including BlackRock and Abu Dhabi’s MGX acquired Aligned Data Centers in a roughly US$40 billion deal, the latest big investment in companies building data centers for the tech giants. The acquisition, which is expected to be finalized by the first half of next year, would be the largest such sale on record and add significant firepower to BlackRock’s growing data center portfolio. BlackRock last year paid US$12.5 billion to acquire fund manager Global Infrastructure Partners, which also owns a stake in data center company CyrusOne. BlackRock’s Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure Partnership–backed by MGX, Microsoft and Nvidia–will also invest in the transaction. The partnership is aiming to invest US$30 billion of equity and up to US$100 billion total, including debt, in data center and power assets. The investor group is buying Aligned from Macquarie Asset Management, which first invested in the business in 2018. Aligned’s roughly US$40 billion enterprise value includes about $21 billion in equity, said one person with knowledge of the deal. https://tinyurl.com/44rbvbm8

JPMorgan commits US$10 billion to strategic US tech investments.

JPMorgan Chase will invest US$10 billion in mostly US-based tech companies working in areas aligned with strategic government interests. The investments are part of a broader pledge by the bank to facilitate US$1.5 trillion of transactions in areas including domestic manufacturing and artificial intelligence. The bank said it’s targeting four sectors for investment–supply chain and advanced manufacturing; defense and aerospace; energy independence and resilience; and frontier and strategic technologies. The pledge to facilitate or finance US$1.5 trillion of deals in those areas is a 50% increase from the bank’s previous plans, it said. JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon twice pointed to critical minerals as an area of focus in a Monday statement. The bank recently worked with MP Materials on a deal with the Department of Defense to increase domestic production of rare earth magnets used in everything from iPhones to fighter jets. https://tinyurl.com/667a26jx

Cursor-maker Anysphere in talks to raise US$1 billion at US$27 billion valuation.

Coatue Management and Accel have been in talks to make major investments in Anysphere, which makes popular coding assistant Cursor, according to two people with direct knowledge of the discussions. Anysphere is planning to raise at least US$1 billion in new capital at a US$27 billion valuation before the investment, according to one of those people. The deal, if closed, would be Coatue Management’s first known investment into the coding assistant startup. Accel, which has also backed Swedish coding startup Lovable, first invested in Anysphere at a US$9.9 billion valuation in June. The deal would continue Accel’s strategy of doubling down on some of its growth-stage bets, as it has done with data labeling startup Scale AI and cloud cybersecurity firm Cyera. Details of the financing haven’t previously been reported. The Information was first to report that investors have offered to finance Anysphere at roughly three times the valuation in its last round. The new funding would add to the approximately US$800 million Anysphere has on its balance sheet, according to one of the people. The firm has been training its own models to power its assistant, driving up costs. https://tinyurl.com/6sf6bnwp

ASML looks to calm fears over 2026 growth as it warns of China sales decline.

Dutch semiconductor equipment giant ASML on Wednesday looked to calm concerns over 2026 growth as it warned that it expects a “significant” sales decline in China. Guidance was key for the firm after shares sank in July when it warned that while it would still prepare for growth in 2026, it could not confirm it at the time due to increasing macro-economic and geopolitical uncertainty. On Wednesday, the firm said it does not expect 2026 total net sales to be below 2025 and added that it will provide more details on its outlook in January. It also maintained its forecast for annual sales to increase around 15% this year in comparison to 2024, with a gross margin of around 52%. Shares ended the session 3% higher. The company continues to benefit from the AI boom with investments helping fuel orders of 5.4 billion euros (US$6.28 billion) in the third quarter. However, CEO Christophe Fouquet warned that the firm expects customer demand and sales in China to decline significantly next year compared to 2024 and 2025. https://tinyurl.com/3jhka4du

Quantum stocks surge after JPMorgan investing push into strategic tech.

The rally in quantum computing names continued on Monday after JPMorgan Chase announced it as one of the areas it would invest in as part of a new initiative. The bank said in a release that it would invest up to US$10 billion in companies across four areas: supply chain and advanced manufacturing, defense and aerospace, energy technology, and frontier and strategic technologies — which includes quantum computing. Arqit Quantum shares closed up 20%, while D-Wave Quantum ended 23% higher and Rigetti Computing gained 25%. IONQ climbed 16%, and Quantum Computing stock gained 12%. “It has become painfully clear that the United States has allowed itself to become too reliant on unreliable sources of critical minerals, products and manufacturing – all of which are essential for our national security,” said CEO Jamie Dimon in a statement. The initiative is part of a larger US$1.5 trillion, decade-long plan, dubbed the “Security and Resiliency Initiative,” to finance and invest in industries JP Morgan deems critical to U.S. national and economic security. As one of the 27 specified sub-areas the bank will be focusing on, quantum computing has seen gains as much as triple digits over the past month. Rigetti and D-Wave were up 175% and 130%, respectively. Tech companies like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon have shown significant interest in gate-model quantum computing, which can potentially solve problems too complex for standard computers. Rigetti and IONQ quantum computers are accessible through Amazon Braket, a quantum computing service managed by Amazon Web Services. In February, Microsoft unveiled its first quantum computing chip called Majorana 1, and Google announced its new breakthrough quantum chip named Willow late last year. https://tinyurl.com/5erzpd57

Jeff Bezos’ ownership stake in Amazon dropped below 10 percent as tech mogul continued stock sell-off.

The Amazon founder has been selling off his shares at a regular cadence since stepping aside as CEO four years ago. For what is likely the first time in Amazon‘s history, founder and executive chairman Jeff Bezos‘ stake is now less than 10 percent of the company. In a securities filing Tuesday, Bezos disclosed that he now owns 9 percent of the company’s shares, after selling off more than 100 million shares over the course of the past year. A year ago, Bezos owned 10.1 percent of Amazon, and a proxy filing earlier this year showed that his stake had dropped to 9.6 percent. When the company went public in 1997, the tech mogul owned more than 43 percent of the company. When he stepped aside as CEO in 2021 and handed day-to-day control over to Andy Jassy, he owned 14.1 percent of the company, per SEC filings. It is not clear how much Bezos netted from his stock sales, but when he filed to sell 25 million shares earlier this year, the estimated returns were US$5 billion. A filing in August disclosed that he would sell another 25 million shares, netting about US$5.4 billion. Bezos also gifted more than half a million shares to charity in the past couple of months, per SEC filings. https://tinyurl.com/7447fz7w

MacKenzie Scott trimmed her Amazon stake by almost US$13 billion, one of the biggest drops since her 2019 split from Jeff Bezos.

MacKenzie Scott has sold nearly half her Amazon stake, according to a filing disclosed this week. A regulatory filing with the SEC, filed Tuesday and dated September 30, shows that Scott’s ex-husband, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, reported holding 81.1 million shares on Scott’s behalf. That’s down from about 139 million shares a year earlier and one of the steepest drops since the couple split in 2019. At Tuesday’s closing share price, the reduction is equivalent to roughly US$12.6 billion. The filing doesn’t specify whether the decline reflects stock sales, charitable transfers, or both, but it marks a major shift for one of the world’s most generous philanthropists. Bezos remains the reporting party because he continues to exercise voting power over Scott’s shares under the terms of their divorce. MacKenzie Scott has given away more than $19 billion to small and midsize nonprofits. Still richer than when she divorced Bezos Scott received a 4% stake in Amazon after her divorce, then worth about US$36 billion, instantly making her one of the richest women in the world. Despite her continued giving — and the latest 42% stake reduction — she remains wealthier than when she left her marriage. https://tinyurl.com/yh6yb8tb

Palmer Luckey’s Anduril launches EagleEye military helmet with help from buddy Zuck.

Anduril, the military tech company founded by Oculus creator Palmer Luckey, has announced the first hardware to come out of its recent partnership with Meta: EagleEye, an AI-powered mixed-reality (MR) system designed to be built into soldiers’ helmets. The modular hardware is a “family of systems,” according to Anduril’s announcement, including a heads-up display, spatial audio, and radio frequency detection. It can display mission briefings and orders, overlay maps and other information during combat, and control drones and military robotics. “We don’t want to give service members a new tool—we’re giving them a new teammate,” says Luckey. “The idea of an AI partner embedded in your display has been imagined for decades. EagleEye is the first time it’s real.” Anduril, which also manufactures border control tech, lethal drones, and military aircraft, has been developing EagleEye since its inception, and already provides software for the Army’s existing MR goggles, based on Microsoft’s HoloLens hardware. Its partnership with Meta was announced this May, and the company told TechCrunch at the time that the collaboration was to develop EagleEye. It’s a reunion of sorts for Luckey and Mark Zuckerberg, after Meta purchased Luckey’s then-start-up Oculus in 2014 and fired the founder three years later. “I am glad to be working with Meta once again,” Luckey said in a blog post at the time. “My mission has long been to turn warfighters into technomancers, and the products we are building with Meta do just that.” https://tinyurl.com/4d2yt3rn

Google’s AI cracks a new Cancer code.

Google DeepMind said Wednesday that its latest biological artificial-intelligence system has generated and experimentally confirmed a new hypothesis for cancer treatment, a result the company calls “a milestone for AI in science.” “With more preclinical and clinical tests, this discovery may reveal a promising new pathway for developing therapies to fight cancer,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai tweeted. In collaboration with Yale University, DeepMind researchers released a 27-billion-parameter foundation model for single-cell analysis called Cell2Sentence-Scale 27B (C2S-Scale), built on Google’s open-source Gemma family of models. The model was able to generate “a novel hypothesis about cancer cellular behavior and we have since confirmed its prediction with experimental validation in living cells. This discovery reveals a promising new pathway for developing therapies to fight cancer,” the company wrote in a blog post today. The finding centers on one of the hardest problems in cancer immunotherapy: how to make so-called cold tumors, which are invisible to the immune system, more hot and thus more responsive to treatment. DeepMind said its model successfully identified a conditional amplifier drug that could boost immune visibility only in certain biological contexts. https://tinyurl.com/msavs4vw

DoorDash and Waymo partner on Autonomous deliveries.

DoorDash unveiled a partnership with Alphabet’s Waymo, under which the restaurant-delivery firm will use Waymo autonomous vehicles for deliveries, starting with the Phoenix area. The arrangement is the latest step by Waymo to expand its business, following a partnership it has with Uber to provide ride-hailing service using Waymo vehicles in certain cities. As part of the deal, DoorDash’s subscribers—customers who subscribe for discounted service—will get discounts on Waymo rides in several cities through the end of the year. But the heart of the arrangement is expanding Waymo’s autonomous ridehailing service to restaurant delivery, echoing how ride hailing giant Uber also runs a food delivery service. Precisely how a Waymo vehicle would deliver food to a customers’ front door isn’t clear, although the companies said DoorDash would use its “autonomous delivery platform,” which includes robots. https://tinyurl.com/yymncmry

CME plans to launch sports contracts to compete with Kalshi.

CME Group Inc. is planning to debut financial contracts tied to both sports games and economic indicators by the end of the year, according to people familiar with the matter. The products would bring the Chicago-based CME into more direct competition with Kalshi and Polymarket, the two platforms for so-called prediction markets that have been making rapid moves into the financial mainstream with the support of Donald Trump Jr., who is an adviser to both companies. CME is preparing to release its new contracts to the public through futures commission merchants, including the one it is setting up with FanDuel, a part of Flutter Entertainment. But CME could also offer them on other similar platforms, opening it up to traditional retail investing brokerages, according to the people, who declined to be identified because the plans are still private. Shares in DraftKings Inc., a competitor of FanDuel, fell as much as 3.8% in postmarket trading after Bloomberg reported the plans. The shares pared losses and were trading down around 1.3%. A partnership with FanDuel, to offer products tied to economic indicators, was announced earlier this year, but the timing and the details of the new offering were unclear. https://tinyurl.com/2rhnb2rh

European Union mulls forced tech transfer for Chinese firms.

The European Union is discussing new rules that would force Chinese companies to transfer their technologies to European companies or form joint ventures with European partners when operating in the region, Bloomberg and other news outlets reported. Such rules would apply to Chinese firms in key industries including cars and batteries, according to Bloomberg, which cited people familiar with the plans. China maintained similar rules on foreign companies seeking to expand into the country in manufacturing and other sectors, and only scrapped or loosened such requirements in recent years, after Chinese companies had become strong enough to compete against their foreign partners. The EU’s discussions are part of the region’s broader effort in recent years to counter the rapid growth of Chinese imports. Earlier this month, the EU proposed higher tariffs on steel imports in a move targeted at Chinese imports. After a meeting of EU ministers in Denmark on Tuesday, Danish foreign minister Lars Rasmussen said at a news conference that Chinese investments in Europe “must come with the precondition that we also have some kind of technology transfer,“ according to Reuters. https://tinyurl.com/2btsbksc