Tech, in brief

ByteDance, the Chinese company behind TikTok, and Alibaba and Tencent, two more of China's biggest tech companies, have ordered more than 3 million of Nvidia's RTX Pro 5500 cards, Reuters reports. [1]

Nvidia is the US company whose chips run most of the world's AI. At about $11,400 a card, the three orders add up to more than $35bn. [1][2]

Nvidia has told customers it cannot promise to fill the orders. One source said buyers may get only 5% to 10% of what they asked for. [1]

Orders from all buyers in China have passed 6 million cards, two sources said. Nvidia may make no more than 3 million of them worldwide in 2027. [1][2]

The card is built for powerful office computers, not for AI data centres. But it is among the strongest Nvidia chips that US export rules still let China buy. [1]

Nvidia's top data-centre chip, the B300, may not be sold to China at all. Its older H200 needs a US licence, decided case by case. [1]

The RTX Pro 5500 has 84GB of memory and as many computing cores as Nvidia's top gaming card, the RTX 5090. [3]

The Chinese firms want it mainly for inference: running AI models that are already trained, to answer users. That needs less computing power than training them. [1]

Last year Chinese firms mostly turned down a similar cut-down Nvidia card, the RTX 6000D, hoping the US would allow stronger chips. That hope has faded. [1][2]

The RTX 6000D has since been discontinued, and its price in China has doubled, one source said. [1]

From 2027 Nvidia is expected to give much of its space at TSMC, the Taiwan company that makes its chips, to Rubin, its next data-centre chip. [1]

Nvidia blamed 'outdated' US rules and China's own limits on US imports. The US office that sets the rules and China's industry ministry did not comment. [1]

Why it matters. Watch how many cards Nvidia actually ships once deliveries start in early 2027, and whether the US decides this card is too strong to keep selling to China. [1][4]

The US State Department on Monday put sanctions on five Chinese entities over AI trade secrets stolen from Google. [5] They include Shanghai Zhisuan Technology, an AI firm founded by Linwei Ding, a former Google software engineer. [5] A US court found Ding guilty in January of stealing Google's AI secrets to help two Chinese companies. [5] A court partly overturned that conviction in August. [5] China's commerce ministry said on Tuesday it firmly opposes the sanctions. [5]

Why it matters. China says its AI firms grew through their own long investment and denies any theft. [5] The sanctions came the same day the US government's ban on DeepSeek's AI in its own agencies was made public. [5]

OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, has stopped pushing for strict US limits on selling advanced chips to China, Politico reports. [4] Members of the US Congress who want those limits plan to add them to the yearly defence spending law after the November elections. [4] They had counted on OpenAI's support. [4] OpenAI depends on Nvidia's chips, and Nvidia put $30bn into OpenAI in February. [4] Anthropic, a rival AI company, still backs the chip bills. [4]

Why it matters. Nvidia is fighting the proposals, and OpenAI's silence removes one of the best-known companies on the other side. [4] It lands as Chinese firms order billions of dollars of the Nvidia chips US rules still allow. [4][1]

Google on Tuesday released TorchTPU as free, open software. [6] It is a version of PyTorch, the toolkit that by some counts 85% of AI apps are built with. [6] Many PyTorch features were built for Nvidia's chips. [6] TorchTPU lets an app run on Google's own AI chips, called TPUs, after a settings change and no rewriting. [6] Amazon released a similar tool for its Trainium chips the day before. [6] Google also said it worked with Meta and Hugging Face so popular tools keep working. [6]

Why it matters. If moving an app to a new chip costs one setting, Nvidia's biggest advantage, that software is written for its chips first, starts to shrink. [6] Google gains if those apps move onto Google Cloud. [6]

A leaked draft of the papers Anthropic must file before selling shares says it cannot get enough computing power from Amazon, Google and Microsoft. [7] The Wall Street Journal obtained the filing. [7] Those three cloud companies now see Anthropic, maker of the Claude AI, as a rival as well as a customer. [7] Anthropic believes it could spend more than $750bn on cloud contracts. [7] It lost $80.7bn in the first half of the year on $16.3bn of sales. [7]

Why it matters. Anthropic is reported to be aiming to sell shares in November, and buyers will be judging a company whose biggest suppliers are also its competitors. [7] It is also leasing data centres from newer operators it describes as having a 'limited operating history'. [7]

Anthropic has told US lawmakers it will rewrite part of a draft AI safety law it had been showing them privately, after a leaked copy drew days of criticism. [8] The draft would let a model be blocked only if it threatened more than 50 deaths or $1bn of damage. [10] Only the US Commerce Department could act, by asking a court. [8] Critics said it would let labs pay their own checkers and override some state laws. [8][9] OpenAI's policy chief, Chris Lehane, wrote that no one company should write the rules. [9]

Why it matters. Anthropic built its name on asking for tough AI rules, and the criticism came mostly from safety campaigners. [8] California's state senator Scott Wiener, who wrote its AI law, said the draft 'falls far short'. [8]

A power fault in one part of Google's London cloud centre took down banks, courts and other services for much of Tuesday. [11][14] The video system used for remote court hearings in England and Wales failed all morning, delaying hearings for people held in custody. [11] In July the UK put Google Cloud and three other companies under direct oversight as 'critical' suppliers to banks. [13] The FCA, Britain's finance regulator, said it was seeking more information from Google. [11] The Bank of England's own regulator is understood to be talking to Google too. [11]

Why it matters. It is the first big outage since the regulators gained those powers this summer, so it tests what the powers can do. [11] Up to 60% of the UK government's computing runs on Amazon, Microsoft and Google, the Guardian reports. [12]

Salesforce, which sells software that companies use to track their customers, agreed on Tuesday to buy Braze for about $5.66bn. [15] Braze makes AI tools that help companies send marketing messages and manage customer data. [15] Braze's owners will get $47.50 a share in cash, against $30.04 at Monday's close. [15] The shares jumped 51% to $45.57. [15] It follows Salesforce's $3.6bn deal for Fin, a maker of AI customer-service tools, a few months ago. [15]

Why it matters. It is Salesforce's second purchase of an AI company in a few months, after Fin. [15] The deal still needs shareholder and regulator approval, and is due to close in Salesforce's 2028 financial year. [15]

Shares in Elice, a South Korean company that builds data centres for AI, fell 32% on their first day of trading in Seoul on Tuesday. [16] It was the worst start on record for a Korean share sale of $100m or more. [16] Elice raised about $151m by selling shares at 90,500 won each. [17] The shares closed at 61,500 won. [16] Ordinary investors had asked for 400 times the shares set aside for them, and most got only a few. [16] They put in about 10.3tn won for shares worth about 50.3bn won. [16]

Why it matters. Planned share sales by Firmus, an Australian data-centre company, and AirTrunk another data-centre company, were already pulled or paused as investors grew wary. [17] Elice is profitable, but buyers judged it with the rest of the AI data-centre group. [16]

Shares in NextDC, an Australian data-centre company, fell 39.5% on Wednesday after it cut its forecast for the year. [18] It now expects sales of A$475m to A$500m, down from A$615m to A$640m. [18] Work to bring more power to its M3 centre in Melbourne has stopped. [18] The power company, Jemena, does not expect to restart before February 2027, citing local opposition and missing council approval. [18] Australia's treasurer said national rules for data-centre investment are nearly ready. [18]

Why it matters. A data centre earns nothing until it has the power to run its computers, so a delay at the plug lands straight on the profit forecast. [18] Citi, a US bank, said the hit could last beyond 2027. [18]

Supermicro, a US maker of servers for AI, said after Tuesday's market close that it expects sales of $18.5bn to $19.5bn for July to September. [19] It had forecast $14.5bn to $15.5bn. [19] It credited 'increased demand for AI platforms'. [19] In June it said it would raise $7bn to fill $39bn of AI server orders. [19] The figures have not been checked by its auditor, and full results are due on 3 November. [19]

Why it matters. It is the opposite signal to Elice and NextDC on the same day: the companies selling the machines are still earning. [19] Supermicro is also under scrutiny over AI servers smuggled to China. [19]

Meta described Prometheus, its giant AI computer in Ohio, in an engineering post on Monday. [21] It already runs hundreds of thousands of Nvidia chips, and Meta plans about a million. [21] Every rack of 72 chips uses 64 and keeps eight spare, because one failure used to stop the whole job. [20] A training run on 32,768 chips therefore needs 37,656. [21] Meta says interruptions fell 99% in a year, to about 11 a day for every 8,000 chips. [20]

Why it matters. At this size broken chips are a daily certainty, so part of every chip bill buys spares that sit idle. [20] Meta trained its Muse AI models on this machine. [21]

Joel Kaplan, Meta's top policy official, will leave the company next year after 15 years, a spokesperson told Reuters on Tuesday. [22] He will stay through the US midterm elections in November. [23] Kaplan, a longtime Republican adviser, took the job in January 2025, as Meta ended US fact-checking and sought closer ties with President Trump. [22] Dina Powell McCormick, Meta's president, will add his outside work to her own. [22] She served in Trump's first administration. [22]

Why it matters. Meta faces child-safety cases and questions about its data centres, and its next face in government will again be someone with ties to Trump. [23][22]

Australia expects to take Meta, TikTok, Snap and Google's YouTube to court over its ban on social media for under-16s, its communications minister, Anika Wells, said. [24] The ban began in December 2025, and the online-safety regulator is using new powers to gather evidence. [24] No case has been filed yet. [24] Figures in August showed teenage TikTok use down by just one percentage point since the ban began. [24] Meta says it has removed more than 750,000 accounts it judged belonged to under-16s. [24]

Why it matters. Meta says age checks should be done once, by the phone's operating system or app store. [24] Wells is building a group of countries, including the UK, Canada and Sweden, to press the big tech firms together. [24]

France's digital minister, Anne Le Hananff, called TikTok and other social media companies to an emergency meeting on Tuesday over the country's worst riots in years. [25] She reminded them to remove violent videos and posts urging people to break the curfew. [25] On Monday, Vinted, eBay, Amazon and other selling sites signed an agreement to look for goods looted in the riots. [25] More than 1,500 shops were looted over the weekend and more than 2,400 people were arrested. [25]

Why it matters. The sites promised France's government a first report within 48 hours, so France will soon see what they actually removed. [25] Protests are planned again for 24 October. [25]

Court papers obtained by NPR, the US public radio network, say TikTok employees repeatedly warned executives about risks to children. [26] Staff said minors were appearing in live videos that viewers paid for with in-app gifts. [27] They also flagged a loophole that let children skip age checks by signing up with a Facebook, Instagram or Google account. [27] The papers say TikTok did not survey its users' ages, fearing it would have to share the results. [26] TikTok says the claims are 'cherry-picked'. [26]

Why it matters. TikTok, Meta, Google and Snap face hundreds of US lawsuits claiming their apps harm children, and papers like these are the evidence in them. [26]

TikTok has begun showing 'no results' for searches on some peptides, The Verge found. [28] Peptides are short chains of protein building blocks. Some are approved medicines, such as semaglutide, the active ingredient in Ozempic. [28] Others, such as BPC-157, are unapproved substances sold online with little evidence that they work. [28] Videos have not been removed, and slightly changed spellings still return results. [28] TikTok's US owner did not comment. [28]

Why it matters. Influencers on the app have been steering viewers to unregulated sellers. [28] A search block that a misspelling gets around slows the trade without stopping it. [28]

Muse, Meta's new AI assistant app, has passed 10 million US downloads in its first 40 days, Sensor Tower, which tracks apps, says. [29] Only 11 other apps have done that, most of them games. [29] ChatGPT had 3.7 million US downloads in its first 40 days. [29] Meta spent 39% of its October advertising on Muse, up from 23% in September. [29] After 14 days, 23% of new users were still using it, against 16% for rival AI apps. [29]

Why it matters. Meta can push a new app to 3.6 billion people a day through its other apps, which no AI start-up can match. [29] Whether users stay once the advertising slows is still unknown. [29]

OpenAI on Tuesday let ChatGPT users lock chosen conversations behind a four-digit PIN, Face ID or Touch ID. [30] Locked chats move to their own section and leave the normal history and search. [30] OpenAI says the feature is for moments when someone else can see the screen. [30] It does not encrypt the chats or change how long OpenAI keeps them. [30] Resetting the PIN deletes every locked chat. [31]

Why it matters. More people now tell ChatGPT personal things, and this protects them from the person beside them, not from OpenAI's own servers. [30][31]

OpenAI says its newest models are much better at rewriting programs in old languages such as COBOL, which it says 40% of the world's banks still use. [32] COBOL is an old programming language, and the people who know it are retiring. [32] On OpenAI's own test, GPT-6 Astra passed 87.4% of tasks across 20 languages, against 26.8% for an older model. [32] OpenAI says the code still needs expert checks before banks use it. [32]

Why it matters. These are OpenAI's own tests, not outside ones. [32] Banks that must leave COBOL face bills of millions to hundreds of millions of dollars. [32]

OpenAI on Tuesday bought Orchestra Bio, a four-year-old start-up whose AI agents handle the paperwork of drug research, from budgets to clinical-trial schedules. [33] The price was not disclosed. [33] Orchestra's team will work on Rosalind, OpenAI's AI model for life-science research. [33] OpenAI says Moderna and Novo Nordisk, two big drug makers, already use Rosalind. [33]

Why it matters. The big AI labs are building software for whole industries, so small firms in those industries risk becoming either a purchase or a rival. [33]

Google is letting Gemini, its AI assistant, draw on a driver's Gmail, Calendar, Maps, Photos and search history while they drive. [34][35] A driver could ask about a flight and Gemini would find the booking in Gmail and check the status. [34] It works only if the driver switches the setting on, and each app can be chosen. [35] It reached Android Auto, which runs from a phone, on Tuesday, and comes to cars with Google built in over the coming months. [34]

Why it matters. Ford, GM, Honda, Volvo and others ship cars with Google's software, so the assistant is already inside millions of cars. [34][35] More of a driver's data now passes through the car. [35]

Apple now lets each customer order no more than two iPhone Duos, its first folding phone, in the US, Japan, Spain and the UK, Engadget found. [36] Some early buyers had ordered more. [36] Waits for some models reached about 14 weeks on the first day of orders, Morgan Stanley said. [37] Apple also said it will put up to $100m over three years into Perryman, a US company, to make the phone's titanium. [37]

Why it matters. JPMorgan expects Apple to ship 8 to 9 million Duos this year, below the 10 million expected, because parts are short. [37] Apple has not said whether the titanium deal adds any phones this year. [37]

Eka Robotics, a US start-up, raised $150m in a deal that values it at $1.45bn. [38] Its robot hand senses force, not only sight, so it can pick up a raspberry without crushing it. [38] Eka says the robot picks up about 1,500 objects an hour, against about 600 for a person. [38] It says it succeeds more than 95% of the time. [38] It was founded by an MIT professor and a former Google DeepMind researcher. [38]

Why it matters. Grasping ordinary objects has long been one of robotics' hardest problems, and outside experts who saw Eka's demonstration were impressed. [38] The speed and success figures are Eka's own. [38]

Arda, a start-up founded by OpenAI's former research chief Bob McGrew, raised $232m and is valued at $1.5bn. [39][40] Its AI software helps engineers turn a new product design into a working assembly line. [39] It has spent a year working with Anduril, a US maker of military equipment. [39] McGrew said it does for factory engineers what coding assistants do for programmers. [40] Next it plans lines run by machines that can be changed as fast as human workers. [39]

Why it matters. Arda's aim is to build in the US things that now need many workers in Asia. [39] McGrew spent more than ten years at Palantir, a US data company. [40]

ASI, a Boston company whose software predicts air traffic, power demand and military operations, raised $325m at a $3bn value. [41] In June the US Federal Aviation Administration gave it an $875m, 12-year contract to manage air traffic with AI. [41] The FAA began using it in September around Washington DC. [41] Delta, United and Alaska airlines and the power company National Grid also use its systems. [41]

Why it matters. The money will take ASI further into energy and military work. [41] Its software now helps decide how planes move around the US capital. [41]