OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman made an unannounced weekend visit to South Korea, meeting about 50 Samsung executives in Yongin and reportedly holding talks with SK Group chairman Chey Tae-won. The trips centre on memory chips, where Samsung and SK Hynix hold roughly 63% of global DRAM revenue and about 83% of high-bandwidth memory. Samsung's 2027 HBM output and SK Hynix's 2029 output are already sold out, and Micron has warned the shortage could run into 2028. No new agreements on pricing or investment were announced. OpenAI has also cut its latest fundraising target to as much as $20 billion.
GitHub's Octoverse 2026 report says AI agents started more than 40% of pull requests on the platform in September 2026, about 110 million, up from 17% in March. Developers pushed code 17.9 billion times over the year, more than 2024 and 2025 combined. Agent-started pull requests touched multiple files 87% of the time, against 79% for human-started ones. GitHub says the surge has strained its infrastructure and contributed to repeated outages. The report shifts the debate from whether agents are used to how much review work they create.
Nvidia has told the contract manufacturers that build its AI servers to plan for price increases of more than 15% on systems shipping in early 2027, according to reports from Bloomberg, Tom's Hardware and Fortune. The cause is memory rather than silicon: DRAM, NAND and high-bandwidth memory prices have climbed through 2026 fast enough that even a company with gross margins near 75% cannot absorb them. HBM contract prices could rise another 70% to 140% in 2027, and hyperscalers are accelerating in-house chip programmes to reduce exposure to both the shortage and Nvidia's pricing.
Spending on artificial intelligence data centres is approaching $1tn across the industry, and investors are starting to question the returns. Technology shares fell sharply, Intel continued to lose ground and the Nasdaq opened at its lowest level in more than two months. Nvidia is still pushing hardware out quickly, including a plan to invest $3bn in Meta's equity offering as the social media company deploys more of its chips for AI agents. The company's pre-built data-centre design is also cutting deployment time from months to about two weeks.
Meta's updated Commercial Terms take effect on 30 October and authorise automated scrapers and crawlers against websites tied to any business account on its platforms. The Register first reported the change on 16 October, when the wording named AI training among the permitted uses. After criticism, Meta removed the explicit training reference and said the terms apply to its ads and business products. Business accounts have no opt-out from the scraping provision, which has alarmed news publishers, who argue the terms let Meta avoid licensing fees for journalism used to train models. Meta has not said whether content gathered this way will be used for training.
Google unveiled Gemini 4 Carbon on Wednesday, fifteen days after widening access to Gemini 4 Argon. The new frontier model is restricted to a small group of cybersecurity defence firms through Google's Fairwind programme rather than a public API. Google says Carbon finds vulnerabilities, builds exploits and writes patches better than Argon, and produces secure code at more than twice Argon's success rate on internal tests. It holds first place on SEC-bench Pro and ExploitGym. Introductory pricing matches Argon at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens.
The United States and China are building rival technology clubs, and middle powers are discovering that membership may soon be exclusive. Washington has told partners they cannot sit inside both the US-led Pax Silica grouping and China's World AI Cooperation Organization. Kazakhstan tried: its AI minister joined US supply chain talks in Washington in June, then signed in Shanghai three weeks later as a founding member of the Chinese initiative. China has funded AI projects in at least 77 low- and middle-income countries, according to AidData, while US export controls keep the most advanced chips on one side of the line.
SpaceX has closed $40bn of debt to buy Nvidia chips for artificial intelligence, Elon Musk said on Sunday. Musk described the financing as callable debt for GPU purchases arriving in the first half of 2027, and said it would not be a major factor this quarter. Bloomberg reported the deal is off-balance-sheet and was possible because SpaceX holds investment-grade ratings and earns revenue from Starlink and rocket launches. Musk used the announcement to draw a contrast with 'neocloud' firms that borrow to resell computing time. The neocloud sector has come under scrutiny over debt loads and doubts about demand, and the deal makes SpaceX one of the largest private borrowers in the AI build-out.
Anthropic has opened a research preview of Claude Duet, an AI agent that runs on its own cloud computer and contacts the user when it finds something worth acting on. The preview is limited to Claude Pro and Max subscribers in the US, who join a waitlist, and costs nothing extra for now. The agent sends a morning brief, works inside connected apps and asks for approval before sending messages, making payments, signing documents or deleting files. It shares usage limits with the rest of the user's plan. Meta, OpenAI and xAI have released similar products. Anthropic says it will use the preview to learn which notifications users keep.
The Nasdaq Composite fell 2.6 percent on Thursday, its steepest one-day drop since June, as investors questioned whether spending on artificial intelligence can keep paying off. The S&P 500 lost 1.21 percent and six of the seven biggest technology companies closed lower. Meta fell nearly 7 percent after lifting its capital spending forecast to between $135bn and $145bn while missing profit expectations. Nvidia dropped 4.4 percent, Intel and AMD each fell about 8 percent, and Broadcom lost 4.3 percent. Brent crude above $114 a barrel added to the pressure, and Asian markets opened lower on Friday.