Tech News · The field notes
Personal Tech — Tuesday, September 15, 2026
Cathie Wood weighs in on the AI slowdown debate; OpenAI acquires Glass Imaging; Google Cloud adds Blackwell GPUs with batch pause and resume; Nuance raises 0M for emotionally intelligent AI; The Boring Company raises B at a 3B valuation.
Cathie Wood (Ark Invest, Sydney, Sept 15) backs the AI slowdown pledge
- calls it positive for safeguarding the industry
- references living through the tech/telecom bubble
- calls Anthropic researchers' "AI could kill humans by 2030" posts "ridiculous"
- says it's an opportunity to focus on cybersecurity
Investor nerves
- Reuters Sept 15 — big-tech data center capex expected near $800B in 2026
- Horizon Investment Services says it's "just talk" until orders/construction deals are cancelled
- OpenAI won't go public in 2026
OpenAI acquires Glass Imaging ($300M+, up from ~$100M 2025 round)
- ex-Apple-founded AI smartphone camera startup
- ML for small-camera image quality
- strong signal of OpenAI consumer hardware imaging stack
- reported by WSJ
Google Cloud
- Dataflow batch pause/resume GA + Nvidia RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell GPU support
- cost-control play for AI workloads
- expect AWS/Azure to follow
Nuance $50M Series A (Seattle, founded 2025 by 3 ex-Apple researchers)
- multimodal AI models with emotional intelligence
- led by Lightspeed
- Accel, Nvidia NVentures, South Park Commons, Define Ventures
- prior $10M seed
- EQ as competitive moat (customer service, healthcare, education)
The Boring Co $3B Series D at $23B valuation, led by UAE
- a16z, Sequoia, Valor participated
- Bastrop TX
- Vegas Loop
- total funding ~$3.9B
Rapid-fire
- Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center CVEs under active exploitation (CVE-2026-20079 CVSS 10.0 auth bypass, CVE-2026-20316
- clusters incl. Sandworm-overlap UAT-11823, Qilin ransomware, credential theft)
- Motive $1.3B (fleet management)
- Forus $150M Series C at $3B (AI agents for prescription-to-treatment pipeline, Bain Capital Ventures-led)
- d-Matrix adopting Nvidia NVLink Fusion for Raptor inference chips (2027 racks, Astera Labs partnership, Microsoft-backed)