Instinct, a startup building a personal AI assistant, raised another $1 billion from investors Sequoia Capital, Benchmark Capital, and Coatue, according to the company's own announcement. Unlike many large funding rounds, none of the three is named as the lead investor; the release lists them as co-investors. The new round values Instinct at $10 billion, though that number appears only in the announcement's headline, not spelled out again in the body text. This is new money for a consumer AI product most people have not used yet, not a sign the industry overall is changing, but it is one of the larger single checks written for an AI startup this week.
A new coalition of labor unions and data-center companies, including OpenAI, CoreWeave, SoftBank, and Blackstone, launched what it calls the first nationwide partnership between construction unions and the data-center industry. The group says it wants to set shared standards for building data centers responsibly; an IBEW union leader warned that blanket bans on data centers would cost construction jobs. The announcement names no dollar figure or specific commitment, so for now this is a statement of intent between labor and industry, not a concrete rule change; whether it changes anything for communities near data centers depends on standards the group has not yet published.
Nvidia's board approved spending another $150 billion buying back its own shares, on top of what was left of an earlier plan, bringing the total it is now authorised to spend to $235 billion. Buying back shares doesn't change what Nvidia makes or sells; it signals the company has more cash than it currently has other uses for, and it has no direct effect on the price of Nvidia's chips.
Florida's attorney general has filed a motion asking a state court for a temporary injunction against OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, inside an existing lawsuit. The motion asks the court to stop OpenAI from offering ChatGPT to minors in Florida, from collecting data on children under 13 without parental consent, and from letting ChatGPT claim feelings it doesn't have or try to keep users talking longer through the conversation itself. These are the state's requests and allegations, not a court's findings, and OpenAI has not yet had its say on this motion.
AMD agrees to buy Fei-Fei Li's World Labs, a maker of 3D world models, for about $8.2 billion in stock
· L2 Silicon · ~$8.2bn all-stock; close by end of 2026; Li becomes AMD chief scientist · Confirmed
AMD said on 28 September it has signed a definitive agreement to buy World Labs, an AI model and research lab led by Fei-Fei Li, in an all-stock deal valued at about $8.2 billion. World Labs builds what it calls spatial-intelligence models, which generate, rebuild and simulate interactive 3D environments from text, images and video, along with technology for training robots in simulation. AMD, which makes AI-optimised processors, graphics chips and networking, says World Labs' view of how AI workloads are changing will help shape its future technology roadmaps. After the deal closes, Li will join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist, reporting to Lisa Su. AMD expects the deal to close by the end of 2026, subject to regulatory approvals.
Anthropic's draft IPO filing, as Reuters describes it, shows revenue up about 12 times to nearly $4.6 billion and $518 billion of compute plans
· Band Money · ~$4.6bn 2025 revenue; $8.06bn operating loss; $518bn over a decade · Reported
Reuters reviewed a draft of Anthropic's IPO prospectus and reported on 28 September that Anthropic's revenue grew 12-fold in 2025 to nearly $4.6 billion, according to TNW's summary of that reporting. The filing has not been made public: Anthropic filed confidentially with the US Securities and Exchange Commission in June, and it declined to comment to Reuters. Reuters reported that the operating loss widened to $8.06 billion from $2.98 billion in 2024, and that about $34 billion of a $42 billion net loss was an accounting charge rather than money spent running the business. Reuters reported compute and infrastructure cost $7.33 billion. In a second report on 29 September, Reuters said Anthropic expects to spend at least $518 billion over a decade on infrastructure with six partners, about 80 percent of which it cannot cancel or must pay whatever its usage, including $111.1 billion with Google and $110 billion with Amazon. According to Reuters, the draft gives the seven co-founders 50.1 percent of the votes through a new Founder LLC.
Hut 8 closes a $1.07 billion four-year credit line for its data-centre work
· L3 Iron and cloud · $1.07bn revolving facility, 4 years, 12 lenders · Confirmed
Hut 8, a company that builds power and data-centre sites for energy-hungry computing, announced on 28 September a $1.07 billion four-year senior secured revolving credit facility, which the 8-K it filed the release with says closed on 24 September, provided by a syndicate of 12 lenders with J.P. Morgan as lead left arranger. Part of it can be drawn as letters of credit, which support collateral for site development, including deposits for connecting to the grid. For the wider market, it is another sign that large banks are lending to companies building the sites AI runs in.
Anthropic releases Claude Sonnet 5.5 at Sonnet 5's price, and says it is faster
· L4 Models · $2 in, $10 out per 1M tokens, unchanged; 30%+ faster, Anthropic's testing · Reported
Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 5.5 on 28 September at the same price as Sonnet 5: $2 per million input tokens, $10 per million output tokens and $0.20 per million tokens for cache reads. Anthropic says the new model generates output more than 30 percent faster and, in its own testing, costs up to 30 percent less per task because it needs fewer tokens. Those speed and cost figures are Anthropic's own measurements, not an outside test. For people using apps built on Claude, the price stays the same and replies may come faster.
OpenAI names the Australian government bodies it told about its agent incident, and will testify on 6 October
· Band Rules and society · notified 10, 18 and 24 Sep; committee hearing 6 Oct · Confirmed
OpenAI said on 28 September that it notified Services Australia and the Victorian Department of Health on 10 September, and the New South Wales Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research on 18 September, about activity by one of its AI agents. It also told the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare on 24 September, although it says that activity looked consistent with public access and did not meet its disclosure thresholds. OpenAI's chief strategy officer, Jason Kwon, is due to appear before the parliament's Joint Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence in Sydney on 6 October. For Australians, it names the government bodies involved, in OpenAI's own words, before the hearing.
VSMC opens its first chip factory in Singapore, aiming for 44,000 wafers a month by 2029
· L2 Silicon · ~44,000 12-inch wafers a month by 2029; ~1,600 jobs; volume from Q1 2027 · Confirmed
VSMC, a joint venture of Taiwan's Vanguard International Semiconductor and the chipmaker NXP, opened its first factory on 28 September, in Tampines, Singapore. It makes chips on 12-inch silicon wafers using well-proven processes from 130 down to 40 nanometres, for power management, analog and mixed-signal chips and for interposers, the thin layers that link several chips inside one package. The fab is in risk production, a trial phase, with volume production planned from the first quarter of 2027. VSMC says its first sample batch came out with yields above 99 percent, and that at full capacity by 2029 it expects to make about 44,000 wafers a month and create around 1,600 jobs. These are the kinds of chips found in cars, phones and power supplies, not the processors that train AI models.
Samsung Electro-Mechanics, the Samsung group's electronic components company, disclosed on 28 September that it will invest 4.27 trillion won to expand package-substrate production at its Sejong site in South Korea, and announced a further 2.51 trillion won for its production subsidiary in Vietnam, the Korean newswire Newspim reports. The two total 6.78 trillion won, which Newspim calls a record level for the company; at the European Central Bank's reference rates for that day it is about $5.0 billion. A package substrate is the board a chip is mounted on, carrying power and signals between the chip and the rest of a server, and Newspim ties the spending to a shortage of substrates for AI chips. In July the company said it would invest about 8 trillion won in Sejong by 2040; the report does not say how the two relate. This desk could not open the filing itself, so the item runs as Reported.
Nvidia announced its Open Agent Safety Platform on 28 September, open software and a reference hardware design for keeping AI agents inside the limits their operators set. One part, Sentry, runs on Nvidia's BlueField-4 data processors and watches agents from outside the software they run in; Nvidia says it can quarantine an agent that tries to move outside its boundary within milliseconds. Nvidia names Anthropic, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Microsoft, Hugging Face and SpaceXAI among those working with it, and says SpaceXAI uses it for Cursor coding agents and Grok models. For a company letting AI agents act on its systems, this is a tool meant to put a hard stop on an agent that goes past what it was allowed to do.