• Nvidia, Microsoft, xAI, and BlackRock are reportedly part of a consortium acquiring Aligned Data Centers in a deal valued at $40 billion — CNBC, Financial Times

• Salesforce announced a $15 billion investment in San Francisco over five years to create an "AI Incubator Hub" and expand its office presence — Wall Street Journal, Reuters

• Google is investing $15 billion to establish its first AI hub in India, which will include a new data center campus and expanded infrastructure — Google Blog, Reuters

• 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 — CNBC, SiliconAngle

• 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 — jpmorganchase.com, CNBC

• Cerebras Systems raised $1.1 billion in a Series G round to accelerate AI chip and infrastructure innovation — Pulse 2.0

• Reflection AI raised $2 billion in a Series B funding round to build autonomous coding agents and scale its infrastructure — Pulse 2.0

• Cerebras Systems raised $1.1 billion in a Series G round to accelerate AI chip and infrastructure innovation — Pulse 2.0

• General Intuition, an AI gaming startup, secured a $134 million seed round to teach agents spatial reasoning using video game clips — TechCrunch

• 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 — Reuters

• Anthropic launched Claude Skills for custom workflows, added Microsoft 365 integrations, and released Claude Haiku 4.5 for faster, cheaper AI — Haiku 4.5, Skills, Microsoft 365

• Slack is upgrading its Slackbot into a full AI assistant that can plan, schedule, search, and perform complex tasks — The Verge

• 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 — Google Blog, Google Blog, TechCrunch

• OpenAI updated its Sora 2 video app with longer generation limits and a Storyboards feature, and enhanced ChatGPT with automatic memory management — X (@OpenAI), OpenAI Help

• 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 — Windows Blog, Microsoft AI

• Nvidia began shipping its DGX Spark, a compact personal AI supercomputer with petaflop performance, with the first unit delivered to SpaceX — nvidia.com, NVIDIA Blogs

• Google DeepMind and Yale University developed an AI model that identified a potential new cancer therapy pathway — Google Blog, The Decoder

• Walmart and OpenAI launched a partnership allowing users to browse and purchase products conversationally within ChatGPT using an "Instant Checkout" feature — Reuters, CNBC

• Character.ai launched 'Scenes,' a feature for creating structured, interactive, narrative-driven role-playing stories — Character.ai Blog

• 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 — Bloomberg, TechCrunch

• 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 — Wikimedia Foundation

• 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 — X (@legit_api), Reddit

• OpenAI paused all Sora video generations of Martin Luther King Jr. after his estate raised concerns over disrespectful and inappropriate AI-generated content — TechCrunch, BBC

• 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" — The Verge

• OpenAI announced it will allow erotic content for verified adult users in ChatGPT starting in December, after implementing new age-gating technology — The Verge, X (@sama)