Meta's stock sale oversubscribed, M6 MacBook Pro and iMac unveiled

TechmemeOct 28, 2026

Tue, Oct 27

Tomorrow's events: Oracle AIWorld (day 4); The Information's WTF Summit (day 2); Ripple Swell (day 2); Earnings: GOOG, MSFT, EBAY, LG Electronics; Apple "Pro and tell" media event; TEDAI

top news

Sources: Meta's $25B share sale was oversubscribed 5x as it seeks $98B for AI spending; the 15 largest investors in the sale accounted for ~70% of shares (Anthony Hughes / Bloomberg)

@amitisinvesting: the $meta selloff due to equity dilution is really annoying but at the same time...can we really blame them? meta and google both did equity raises this year for about $100B each...google is flat ytd and meta is now red after peaking at $780. they have both been opportunity costs, but not because they are small spec plays that you took a chance on...these are some of the greatest businesses in the world. the problem is, they need capital. they dont have fcf anymore. they levered up their balance sheets. the only thing left is equity to offer.

@jrichlive: “Investors are wary about CAPEX spending” “We'll take 5X more equity than you'll allow us to buy” Market has so many conflicting narratives but the direction of travel is clear

@stockmktnewz: Meta Platforms's $META upsized $25 billion share sale attracted demand for ~5x the available shares The offering priced at $625 per share. 50%+ of the shares were given to long-only and existing investors The investors taking the 15 largest stakes accounted for ~70% of the offering

Nvidia and Meta expand their Muse partnership, including Meta deploying more Vera Rubin and Vera CPUs; Nvidia will invest $3B in Meta's planned equity fundraise (Wall Street Journal)

Apple unveils a 14" MacBook Pro with an M6, which has a 12-core CPU and a 12-core GPU, 16GB or 32GB of unified memory, and Wi-Fi 7, for $1,999+ from November 6 (Apple)

@gregjoz: Everyday tasks? No sweat. Faster graphics? Nailed it. On-device AI? You bet. It's the new 14-inch MacBook Pro and iMac, faster than ever and supercharged by M6.

@petematheson: New M6 Macbook Pro's no longer come with a power adapter. 😬

@joannastern: New 14-inch MacBook Pro with M6. The chip upgrade is the main upgrade. Apple really leaning into on-device, local AI capabilities. And some good news: Pricing appears to be staying the same.

SPONSOR Cheap code, precious trust: Code modernization at scale — The promise—and challenges—of agentic software engineering, from large-scale code migration to language modernization.

Google launches Genie 4, a world model powered by Gemini 3.8 Flash designed to generate interactive AI simulations, initially as a preview to trusted testers (Jay Peters / The Verge)

@sundarpichai: Excited to share Genie 4 today our most realistic and interactive world model: - steer dynamic environments in real time, shaping events, camera angles, and actions - generate native audio matched to the world, from realistic background sounds to characters who can converse in real time! - simulate photorealistic scenes and real-world physics - create more coherent multi-step events through reasoning from Gemini

@emollick: Genie 4 is quite an insane experience, generating game-like enviornments as you go. It isn't flawless but I can type “Neogothic brutalist city inhabited by robots and horses” & it creates one in a minute. Then I asked it to add dragons. Then a friendly otter NPC. All in realtime

@autismcapital: We're years away from building the Infinite Jest. The permanent plug in digital world uniquely optimized for you specifically. A custom world so believable it captures your mind and you will never want to leave. Pair this with advancements in headset displays and baby its over.

Sources: Broadcom CEO Hock Tan held 11th-hour talks and agreed to higher rates and loan guarantees to secure bank participation in the $63B Anthropic debt deal (Wall Street Journal)

Apple adds a beta AI assistant built on Apple's and OpenAI's models to Keynote, Pages, Numbers, and Logic Pro, plus MCP support to Keynote, Pages, and Numbers (Emma Roth / The Verge)

Anthropic's S-1 shows an 85% gross margin in H1 from running its models, a reality check for skeptics who said pay-as-you-go model sales wouldn't be profitable (Stephanie Palazzolo / The Information)

S-1: Anthropic spent ~$2.50 on compute and infrastructure for every $1 of revenue in Q1 2025, falling to under 50 cents in Q2 2026, as it seeks profitability (Financial Times)
Anthropic's S-1 excludes Labs co-lead Ben Mann from its “Continuing Founders” and Founder LLC; Anthropic says “it's still fair to refer to him as a co-founder” (Zara Stone / The San Francisco Standard)

Artificial Intelligence

Oracle adds ChatGPT and Codex to its app stack and expands Oracle Cloud Infrastructure lineup with Google TPUs, OpenAI's Jalapeño chip, and Cerebras hardware (Seema Mody / CNBC)

Source: OpenAI, a major Nvidia customer, plans to buy Google's TPUs; a job listing shows it seeks an engineer to “lead the optimization” of its models on TPUs (Ryan Barwick / The Information)

Memo: Amazon says measuring AI adoption solely by token usage or code generation is “deeply flawed,” as it discourages staff from tokenmaxxing (Annie Palmer / CNBC)

Anthropic details early drug development work with six partners and says it has acquired Mithril, a one-person company working on muscular dystrophy (Anthropic)

Anthropic expands its US GSA partnership to give federal, state, local, tribal, and territorial governments a 40% discount on Claude, estimated to save $1B (Anthropic)

Ahead of US midterms, ChatGPT draws images “depicting election interference or that may discourage voting” in a cartoon style, ignoring photorealism requests (Katelyn Chedraoui / CNET)

Analysis: AI political groups have spent $78.5M on US federal candidates during the 2026 cycle; AI accelerationists spent $34M and safeguard-focused groups $39M (Luke Fountain / CNBC)

Study: non-English languages can consume far more AI tokens, with the most expensive language using 1.5x to 5x more than the cheapest, causing a “tokenizer tax” (Ananya Bhattacharya / Rest of World)

China's Star 50 index of AI and chip leaders is down by 40% in under four months, losing ~$480B in market value; chipmaker CXMT is down ~25% in the past month (Reuters)

An Anthropic hiring manager says he stopped giving coding interviews because Claude is better at them and tells junior engineers that “hunger beats tenure” (Felix Rieseberg)

Earnings

Robinhood reports Q3 revenue up 12% YoY to $1.42B, in line with est., crypto revenue down 55% to $120M, and profit down 14% to $476M; HOOD drops 5%+ after hours (Reuters)

PayPal reports Q3 revenue up 2% YoY to $8.58B, below $8.71B est., TPV up 6% to $487.14B, and raises full-year adjusted EPS guidance to ~$5.60, above $5.39 est. (Elias Schisgall / Wall Street Journal)

NXP reports Q3 revenue up 19% YoY to $3.79B, vs. $3.76B est., and forecasts Q4 revenue below estimates; NXPI drops 7%+ after hours (Christina Kyriasoglou / Bloomberg)

SK Hynix reports Q3 revenue up 328% YoY to ~$78.8B, vs. ~$74.07B est., and operating profit up 632% to ~$62.76B, vs. ~$57.78B est. (Jenny Lee / CNBC)

funding deals

Sources: AI robotics startup Physical Intelligence is in talks to raise $1B+ led by Avenir and Lux Capital at a ~$20B valuation, up from $11.5B earlier in 2026 (Bloomberg)

Sources: UK stealth AI startup 22one, which is building law enforcement tools, hit a nearly $400M valuation after raising funds from Sequoia, Lux, and others (Financial Times)

Neocloud General Compute, which specializes in bare-metal infrastructure, raised a $100M Series A led by Blackbird and Abstract at an $800M post-money valuation (Tim Fernholz / TechCrunch)

Hyphenate, which develops reinforcement-learning-driven AI agents to automate corporate finance tasks, raised a $45M Series A, taking its total funding to $54M (Saritha Rai / Bloomberg)

Infisical, which helps companies use AI agents without handing over their private credentials, raised a $40M Series B led by Elad Gil at a $600M valuation (Rashi Shrivastava / Forbes)

London-based Machenta, which is building an AI model that can teach robots new physical tasks after seeing them performed just once, raised a $40M seed (Rya Jetha / Business Insider)

Avante, which builds an AI platform to help companies manage employee healthcare and other benefits, raised a $30M Series A, following a $10M seed in 2024 (Kurt Schlosser / GeekWire)

more news

Sources: Trend Micro's TrendAI found Israeli adtech company Discover-Tech heavily targeted Starlink users in 100+ countries, likely to geolocate or surveil them (Raphael Satter / Reuters)

Discord says it will let public-channel messages from servers listed in Server Discovery appear in web search from mid-December; admins and members can opt out (Lauren Forristal / TechCrunch)

SPONSOR Your Linkthread page just leveled up! Better analytics, bolder designs, bigger teams. — Since we launched Linkthread in March 2025, over 10,000 businesses have signed up to make their one bio link work harder.

Anduril and Qualcomm unveil BlueChip, a line of laptops designed and assembled in the US for defense and government; Anduril will begin taking orders in 2027 (Bloomberg)

Dallas-based Disruptive raised $10B to invest in AI, defense, and software, doubling its AUM, and pivots from single-deal SPVs to a discretionary fund structure (Natasha Mascarenhas / Bloomberg)

Experts: since June, $100M+ in US data center freight has been stolen; in two successful heists, robbers struck escorts protecting trucks hauling $10M+ in goods (Lisa Cavazuti / NBC News)

GM plans to switch from the NYSE to Nasdaq on November 17 as part of its push under Tesla veteran Sterling Anderson to use AI to speed up its development cycle (Financial Times)

Microsoft patches a severe flaw in its Android Authenticator app that could let untrusted apps impersonate Microsoft apps and obtain delegated account tokens (Abinaya / Cyber Security News)

The FCC warns TP-Link that three of its routers violate power limits, which could bring more bans, and it may have submitted “false or incorrect information” (Bloomberg)

A US federal judge orders the Trump administration to halt a ban prohibiting the Pentagon from doing business with any company that does lobbying for Alibaba (Peter Blumberg / Bloomberg)

This email was sent to [subscriber]
Images not loading in Outlook? Add us to your address book!
Techmeme 530 Divisadero St. #175 San Francisco, CA 94117 USA