🍦 Claude Skills vs MCP: The AI Tool War Nobody Asked For
A week where Anthropic launched workflows, OpenAI added memory, Slack declared itself an assistant, and everyone else responded by spending another $40 billion on chips.
FOMA AI News
October 18, 2025
Scooped from multiple sources. Read it fast before it melts.
⚡ If you only have 1 minute...
$40B Data Center Deal: Nvidia, Microsoft, xAI, and BlackRock consortium acquiring Aligned Data Centers in a deal valued at $40 billion
Anthropic Launches Claude Skills: Custom workflows, Microsoft 365 integrations, and Claude Haiku 4.5 for faster, cheaper AI
Salesforce $15B Investment: Announced $15 billion investment in San Francisco over five years to create an “AI Incubator Hub”
💰 Market Moves
[ACQUISITION] Nvidia, Microsoft, xAI, and BlackRock are reportedly part of a consortium acquiring Aligned Data Centers in a deal valued at $40 billion
[INVESTMENT] Salesforce announced a $15 billion investment in San Francisco over five years to create an “AI Incubator Hub” and expand its office presence
[INVESTMENT] Google is investing $15 billion to establish its first AI hub in India, which will include a new data center campus and expanded infrastructure
[PARTNERSHIP] Nscale, an AI infrastructure firm, announced a $14 billion expanded partnership with Microsoft to supply 200,000 Nvidia chips and plans to go public in late 2026
[INVESTMENT] JPMorgan Chase announced it will invest up to $10 billion over a decade in companies critical to national security, including AI and other frontier technologies
[FUNDING] Cerebras Systems raised $1.1 billion in a Series G round to accelerate AI chip and infrastructure innovation
[FUNDING] Reflection AI raised $2 billion in a Series B funding round to build autonomous coding agents and scale its infrastructure
[FUNDING] General Intuition, an AI gaming startup, secured a $134 million seed round to teach agents spatial reasoning using video game clips
[METRIC] Anthropic is reportedly on track to hit $9 billion in annual recurring revenue by the end of 2025 and projects revenues of $20-26 billion by the end of 2026
🛠️ Tech & Product
[LAUNCH] Anthropic launched Claude Skills for custom workflows, added Microsoft 365 integrations, and released Claude Haiku 4.5 for faster, cheaper AI
[UPGRADE] Slack is upgrading its Slackbot into a full AI assistant that can plan, schedule, search, and perform complex tasks
[UPDATE] Google released Veo 3.1 with improved video generation, and added new AI features like “Help me schedule” in Gmail and virtual makeup in Meet
[UPDATE] OpenAI updated its Sora 2 video app with longer generation limits and a Storyboards feature, and enhanced ChatGPT with automatic memory management
[INTEGRATION] Microsoft integrated new Copilot features into Windows 11, including ‘Hey Copilot’ voice activation and screen analysis, and launched its first in-house text-to-image model, MAI-Image-1
[SHIPMENT] Nvidia began shipping its DGX Spark, a compact personal AI supercomputer with petaflop performance, with the first unit delivered to SpaceX
[RESEARCH] Google DeepMind and Yale University developed an AI model that identified a potential new cancer therapy pathway
[PARTNERSHIP] Walmart and OpenAI launched a partnership allowing users to browse and purchase products conversationally within ChatGPT using an “Instant Checkout” feature
[FEATURE] Character.ai launched ‘Scenes,’ a feature for creating structured, interactive, narrative-driven role-playing stories
🗣️ Industry Chatter
[MOVEMENT] Apple’s AI search lead, Ke Yang, has departed for Meta, marking another high-profile exit from the company’s AI division as it works to revamp Siri
[TREND] Wikipedia reported an 8% drop in pageviews, attributing the decline to AI search summaries on platforms like Google which answer user queries directly without a click-through
[LEAK] A leaked memo suggests Google’s Gemini 3.0 Pro may be released on October 22, with early testers reporting it outperforms competitors on coding tasks and can simulate an entire OS in a single HTML file
[PAUSE] OpenAI paused all Sora video generations of Martin Luther King Jr. after his estate raised concerns over disrespectful and inappropriate AI-generated content
[REQUEST] The Japanese government formally requested that OpenAI refrain from using copyrighted manga and anime imagery to train its Sora video generation model, calling the content “irreplaceable treasures”
[ANNOUNCEMENT] OpenAI announced it will allow erotic content for verified adult users in ChatGPT starting in December, after implementing new age-gating technology
🍦🔥 Dare to summon the bot?
Our Ice Cream mascot is desperately looking to make new friends. Share us on LinkedIn and tag @FOMA AI News. We guarantee a snappy comment (or a light roast) on your post within 24 hours.
Warning: Bot has zero chill.