November 16th

Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon collectively spent $112 billion on capital expenditures in the past three months, signaling that immense infrastructure needs are driving massive debt financing into the tech boom.

Big Tech leadership told investors to expect capital expenditure spending to "skyrocket" next year, following more than $350 billion invested this year, reflecting a fear of missing out (FOMO) mentality driving unprecedented long-tail investments.

Gamma, an AI presentation startup, raised $68 million in funding at a $2.1 billion valuation with only 52 employees, validating strong investor confidence in niche generative AI applications that automate common enterprise tasks like content creation.

The AI stock boom is primarily benefiting the wealthy, widening the existing wealth gap as massive industry gains accrue to those already invested in technology heavyweights like NVIDIA, raising questions about how AI's financial rewards are being distributed across the global workforce.

Anthropic announced a $50 billion commitment to U.S. AI infrastructure development, with initial data center projects planned for Texas and New York, marking its biggest U.S. expansion and underscoring the immense capital required to remain competitive.

Microsoft and Google pledged to invest over $16 billion combined to expand AI infrastructure in Europe, with Microsoft directing over $10 billion toward a Portugal data-center hub and Google investing over $6 billion in Germany, bolstering overseas AI capacity amid a global infrastructure race.

Big Tech's demand for high-speed connectivity has sparked a booming investment in underwater cables, which are crucial for transmitting massive data loads required by modern AI systems and represent a quiet infrastructural bottleneck in the AI race.

A newly formed chip partnership between Tesla and Intel is positioned to offer significant cost disruption, potentially running AI calculations for as little as 10% of the cost currently associated with NVIDIA chips, suggesting that current hardware leaders' high margins face mounting pressure.

Accenture's CEO warned the company is "exiting" employees who fail to embrace generative AI tools, putting over 779,000 staff on notice that AI competency is now mandatory for continued employment, signifying a shift from fearing replacement by AI to fearing replacement by AI-proficient workers.

Amazon laid off approximately 14,000 corporate employees and Salesforce cut 4,000 customer support roles in 2025, with both executives explicitly citing AI investments as the catalyst for workforce reductions, showing that AI-driven automation is already producing large tangible cuts in white-collar and support positions.

Early-career workers (ages 22 to 25) in AI-exposed fields like software engineering experienced a 6% decline in employment from late 2022 to July 2025, according to payroll data analyzed by Stanford researchers, providing quantifiable evidence that AI is reshaping entry-level job structures.

DoorDash saved developers approximately 1,000 hours of manual work by deploying Deductive AI to automate debugging, confirming successful enterprise integration of AI agents and demonstrating that AI is progressing beyond experimentation to deliver significant operational efficiency.

Chinese state-sponsored hackers successfully leveraged Anthropic's Claude AI model to automate and accelerate parts of their cyber espionage campaigns, revealing a critical security risk where state actors are rapidly weaponizing advanced AI models for malicious purposes.

Anthropic detailed its efforts to make the Claude model "politically even-handed," responding to political pressure from the White House regarding alleged ideological bias in commercial AI, demonstrating the tension between political demands and technical fine-tuning in establishing AI guardrails.

OpenAI is battling court orders to protect user chat privacy while facing lawsuits including a wrongful-death claim stemming from a Character.AI chatbot, raising major liability questions for AI companies and highlighting the urgent need for clear emotional safety policies.

Minnesota attorneys were caught presenting documentation containing fabricated court precedents generated by AI hallucinations, underscoring that the unreliability of large language models remains a professional liability hazard with real-world consequences.

Baidu unveiled its proprietary ERNIE 5.0 multimodal foundation model, claiming performance that beats OpenAI's GPT-5.1 and Google's Gemini on key benchmarks, intensifying the U.S.-China technology race that some observers view as a new "cold war" focused on AI supremacy.

OpenAI introduced GPT-5.1, offering users eight distinct personalities and account-level personalization options, signaling a focus on moving beyond pure technical output toward a more customizable user experience for enterprise and consumer applications.

Google updated NotebookLM to include a "Deep Research" feature powered by Gemini, significantly expanding the tool's ability to ingest and analyze multiple file formats for complex tasks and positioning itself as an "awakening AI giant."

Meta open-sourced Omnilingual ASR, a speech recognition model supporting over 1,600 spoken languages, a crucial step toward building truly global AI applications and furthering Meta's efforts to democratize AI technology beyond dominant languages.