Chinese spy plot aimed at Nvidia CEO, DoorDash to buy Instacart

TechmemeOct 30, 2026

Thu, Oct 29

Tomorrow's events: TEDAI (day 3)

top news

US officials believe Megaspeed executive Alice Huang, who has a close relationship with Jensen Huang, is a Chinese asset; Trump was briefed and took no action (New York Times)

@jonlemire: Trump was briefed about the intelligence findings and chose not to do anything He has been wary of disrupting Nvidia's chip sales, which are helping to drive the economy and the stock market, and of complicating the trading relationship with China

@byron_wan: ...American spy agencies had gathered striking intelligence...Megaspeed is essentially a middle man. It has bought Nvidia chips from Aivres, the US arm of :cn: Inspur, which has been blacklisted for funneling technology to the Chinese military, though Aivres remains free of sanctions. Megaspeed has then provided that computing power to Alibaba and other Chinese companies

@chrisrmcguire: Today's report in the NYT confirms that not only is the problem of Nvidia chips being diverted to China via Southeast Asia as bad as many people have asserted, but also that the leadership of the Department of Commerce and Nvidia are very likely aware of this, but are still doing nothing to act. It is mind boggling that we are doing nothing to stop this [...]

DoorDash agrees to acquire Instacart in a ~$17B deal, paying $65 per share, a 26% premium to its October 22 close, as the platform delivery market consolidates (Reuters)

@t_xu: Main Street doesn't need to out-build the world's biggest online retailers and grocers. What it needs is access to what others have built for themselves. @DoorDash and @Instacart share that mission and focus. Coming together will enable the best possible logistics and software infrastructure to produce the best possible grocery delivery experience. The combined reach and network density will lower fulfillment costs for grocers, offer more savings and faster delivery options for consumers, and provide greater earning opportunities for Dashers and Shoppers. Grocery delivery is still early and the product isn't there yet, but we think its future is local - because when more people shop local, more dollars stay local.

@nycmayor: Just last month, DoorDash couldn't seem to find the money to pay their deliveristas — until our administration forced them to give back $131M+ in stolen wages and penalties. This week, they've managed to find $17 billion to acquire one of their main competitors. Corporate consolidation means higher prices, harsher exploitation, and greater economic inequality for New Yorkers. We've stood up to these giants before. That doesn't stop now.

@adamkovac: Calling DoorDash-Instacart a grocery monopoly only works if you leave out Walmart, the biggest online grocer in America (~37%), now offering 30-minute delivery in 33 markets. Local grocers need scale to compete with that, and this deal could help.

SPONSOR GitHub Universe 2026: Highlights from the developer's developer conference — Copilot Fusion was the belle of the ball, but the hero at the heart of the two-day event was the developer community.

Binance says it is investigating a “potential security issue” as suspicious outflows reach up to $5.8B; Tether freezes 1.5B+ USDT, Circle freezes 800M+ USDC (The Block)

@cz_binance: User funds are safe! It does look like a hack on Binance. Appreciate the quick freeze from Tether (~$971m) and Circle (~$823m). I don't manage Binance (.com) anymore, but as a shareholder, I expect all user funds will be fully covered.

@spreekaway: Unconfirmed, but possibly massive binance hack. Entire Binance wallet drained into new EOA. Contract call was funded by Tornado Cash

@elonmusk: Everyday is Zeroday

Amazon reports Q3 revenue up 12% YoY to $201.94B, vs. $202.31B est., net income down 2% to $20.7B, forecasts Q4 revenue below est.; AMZN drops 7%+ after hours (Amazon)

Intel reports Q3 revenue up 21% YoY to $16.5B, vs. $16.5B est., and forecasts Q4 revenue and adjusted EPS below estimates; INTC drops 23%+ after hours (Katie Tarasov / CNBC)

Hackers leak the personal data of 41,000+ DHS employees and contractors, including CBP and ICE agents; DDoSecrets says the data came from DHS' Okta login system (Wired)

Bluesky blocks links to a leaked archive containing personal data of 41,000+ DHS employees and contractors, saying it was “shared without their authorization” (Wired)

Kalshi raised $1B led by Sequoia and Wellington Management at a $40B valuation, up from a $22B valuation after raising $1B in May, its last raise before an IPO (Lauren McCarthy / New York Times)

How surging demand from AI hyperscalers has quintupled flash memory prices and shifted market and negotiating power from Apple to suppliers like Kioxia (Rolfe Winkler / Wall Street Journal)

earnings

Samsung reports Q3 revenue up 127% YoY to a record ~$146.3B and a record operating profit up 783% to ~$80.5B, both meeting est.; chip unit revenue hit ~$110B (Jenny Lee / CNBC)

Alphabet's stock falls 12.3%, wiping a record $500B from its market cap, after reporting negative cash flow amid its AI spending; the Nasdaq falls 1.4% (Stephen Morris / Financial Times)

STMicro reports Q3 revenue up 17.9% YoY to $3.76B, operating income up 98% to $429M, above $400.5M est., and forecasts $4.15B in Q4 revenue, above $4.10B est. (Reuters)

Reddit reports Q3 revenue up 53% YoY to $895M, vs. $878M est., DAUq up 12% to 130.3M, below est., forecasts Q4 revenue below est.; RDDT drops 17%+ after hours (Jonathan Vanian / CNBC)

Sandisk reports Q1 revenue up 378% YoY to $11B, vs. $10.7B est., forecasts Q2 revenue above est., announces an 8-for-1 stock split; SNDK drops 4%+ after hours (MarketWatch)

Pinterest reports Q3 revenue up 12% YoY to $1.17B, vs. $1.21B est., global MAUs up 10% to 661M, and forecasts Q4 revenue below est.; PINS drops 8%+ after hours (Liz Moyer / Barron's Online)

Coinbase reports Q3 revenue down 35% YoY to $1.22B, in line with est., and net income up 66% to $719M, its first profit in a year, on unrealized crypto gains (Olga Kharif / Bloomberg)

Microsoft reports Q1 Xbox hardware revenue down 14% YoY, Xbox content and services revenue down 2%, and Windows OEM and Devices revenue down 22% (Tom Warren / The Verge)

Roblox reports Q3 bookings down 12% YoY to $1.7B, vs. $1.63B est., and DAUs down 9% to 138M, vs. 145.8M est.; RBLX drops 16%+ after hours (Cecilia D'Anastasio / Bloomberg)

artificial intelligence

Mistral releases the weights for Mistral Large 4, or Le Chonk, and says it rivals top open models such as GLM-5.3 on the Artificial Analysis Coding Agent Index (Radhika Rajkumar / ZDNET)

Source: Anthropic is “Customer B” cited by SpaceX in a filing as its single largest customer accounting for 34.5% of Q3 revenue, surpassing the US government (Bloomberg)

Sources: an Accenture staffer's Claude agent ran on a DOD network for two months and appears to have sent info to a third-party site before it was identified (Vittoria Elliott / Wired)

Google plans to expand “high-quality ads within AI Overviews in AI Mode” into international markets, as growth in its core search ad business slows (Lauren Forristal / TechCrunch)

OpenAI updates Model Spec to reorganize it around five values: faithfulness to human intent, harm minimization, honesty and transparency, human agency, and care (OpenAI)

Sources: DeepSeek and Moonshot AI heavily relied on GPT-6 Astra distillation to train models like Kimi K3.1 Pro and V4.1-Flash 1017, after Anthropic's crackdown (The Information)

Epic Games says it is using AI tools to “develop code and features” for Unreal Engine, including core engine components like the D3D12 rendering layer (Jamie Hore / This Week in Videogames)

National Student Clearinghouse: US computer science enrollment fell 12%+ for undergrads and 10%+ for grad students this fall, as AI reduces coding jobs (Elizabeth Rembert / Bloomberg)

Q&A with Sam Altman on finding PHP bugs, sandboxing superhuman models as an unsolved safety dilemma, robotics scaling data centers, math, agent swarms, and more (John Collison / Cheeky Pint)

Q&A with Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar on diffusing intelligence, safety, AI lessons, forward-deployed engineering, Anthropic vs. the US, AI religion, and more (Ben Thompson / Stratechery)

A profile of Tencent Cloud CEO Dowson Tong, who is shifting Tencent's AI focus toward businesses and betting on its Claude Cowork-style assistant WorkBuddy (Bloomberg)

social networks

Reddit plans to require users to log in to fully access the site in response to AI scraping, and to begin tests in select markets outside the US this quarter (Sara Fischer / Axios)

Sources: Instagram is offering select creators $50K to $500K to cross-post their long-form YouTube content to its new “Features” product (Business Insider)

Sources: Bloomberg, Susquehanna, and Jump Trading signed up for Truth Social's fast API feed of President Trump's posts, paying $60K to $100K per month (Reuters)

data centers

Sources: Situational Awareness is pitching clients to invest in Fluidstack alongside it in a round that values the neocloud at $40B, up from $18B in September (Bloomberg)

Sources: Nvidia is in talks to provide Nscale with billions of dollars in credit guarantees for debt to develop a 460MW data center that Anthropic plans to use (Phoebe Liu / The Information)

Sierra Club expects US power emissions to hit 2.1B metric tons by 2030, up 42% on 2025 and erasing 15 years of cuts, with off-grid data centers matching Mexico (Bloomberg)

litigation

Utah files 14 criminal charges against Kalshi and its co-founders Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara for allegedly breaking Utah's gambling laws (Andy Larsen / Salt Lake Tribune)

Zillow agrees to pay $212.5M to settle an investor class action over its failed Zillow Offers home-flipping venture, after SCOTUS refused to hear its appeal (Jonathan Stempel / Reuters)

The UK FCA, which sued Justin Sun-linked crypto exchange HTX in 2025 for “unlawfully promoting crypto asset services”, says HTX will exit the UK in a settlement (Financial Times)

How Maynard v. Snapchat, a 2016 lawsuit linked to a car crash involving Snapchat's speed filter, sparked social media's legal reckoning over user safety (Olivia Carville / Bloomberg)

public listings

Jio Platforms adds $36B in market value in two trading sessions, hitting a $144B market cap, up from its ~$108B IPO valuation, after India's biggest-ever IPO (Ashutosh Joshi / Bloomberg)

A profile of Nscale CEO Josh Payne, who is proceeding with plans for a US IPO that sources say is targeting a $30B valuation despite some investor pushback (Mark Bergen / Bloomberg)

funding deals

Canada-based Cohere completes the first close of a round that it expects to total up to $5B, with Canada agreeing to invest up to $1.14B, at a $20.5B valuation (Bloomberg)

Serval, which offers AI agents for enterprise IT operations like access management, raised $150M led by Sequoia at a $3B valuation, up from $1B in December 2025 (Harshita Mary Varghese / Reuters)

Source: Dulo, a startup co-founded by Google veteran Sebastian Thrun to build “foundation models for hardware design”, raised a $130M seed (Rocket Drew / The Information)

Ottawa-based Solink, which uses AI to pull data from already-installed security cameras, raised $100M+ led by Vertu Capital, bringing its total raised to $198M+ (Duncan Riley / SiliconANGLE)

Fragment, which uses AI to resolve purchasing and payment issues across manufacturing datasets, emerges from stealth with $56M from 8VC and others (Chris Metinko / Axios)

Wabi, which is building an AI assistant that integrates into group chats and can take actions like booking appointments, raised $55M at a $1.25B valuation (Micah Barkley / Bloomberg)

Collective, which uses AI to automate bookkeeping for solo business owners, raised a $40M Series B and $60M in nondilutive capital from GC's Customer Value Fund (Natalie Breymeyer / Axios)

Circuit Mind, which uses AI to automate electronics and circuit design, raised $25M, including an $18.5M Series A led by Norwest, and plans a US relocation (Natalie Breymeyer / Axios)

SuperMe, which generates AI-powered chats with simulated profiles of prominent industry experts to let users ask questions, raised $20M (Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch)

more news

Apple's touchscreen MacBook Pro is designed for the iPad generation, with an optimized macOS, and the company is right to move on from Steve Jobs' skepticism (Federico Viticci / MacStories)

Thrive Holdings agrees to acquire ADT in an all-cash take-private deal, valuing ADT at ~$7.6B in equity value, a ~46% premium over its October 27 closing price (Claire Rychlewski / Axios)

SPONSOR Introducing the new Zoho Analytics: Agentic analytics for every business — We're excited to announce the launch of the new Zoho Analytics! This release marks a major shift for the product, from being a self-service BI platform built …

Polymarket resumes trading after a security incident with a third-party provider, which a source says is DebugBear, and says it will reimburse affected traders (Reuters)

Vladimir Putin praises Elon Musk as a “real genius” and says Russia is in “close contact” with Musk and the US to coordinate Rassvet and Starlink satellites (Kali Hays / BBC)

Sources: Microsoft is seeking to raise $25B+ in its first US investment-grade bond sale since 2017, when it raised $17B, to fund AI-related capital expenditures (Bloomberg)

Sources: the Pentagon is treating the late August freezer malfunctions across 6+ military bases as a suspected cyberattack and is working with French police (Reuters)

Symbotic says Walmart has committed an additional $6B over several years to deploy Symbotic's supply-chain automation technology across its distribution network (Sanskriti Shekhar / Reuters)

Sources: Google, Meta, and other tech companies are resisting broad ICE demands for user data as they face future Democratic-led congressional investigations (Wall Street Journal)

Airbnb spent $12.6M+ since 2025 to become a top LA political contributor, backing Mayor Karen Bass and pushing for friendlier rules ahead of the 2028 Olympics (Liam Dillon / Politico)

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