Tech News · The field notes
Personal Tech — Saturday, September 26, 2026
Tesla's Semi finally reaches commercial fleets, Anthropic signs an $11.6B Akamai cloud deal, OpenAI reviews models browsing government sites, Salesforce unveils its AI agent harness at Dreamforce, and AMD tops $1T.
Tesla Semi commercial fleet deliveries begin (Reuters, Sept 25)
- first volume deliveries from dedicated Sparks, Nevada factory, almost nine years after 2017 unveiling
- follows record 2,500-truck order
- limited PepsiCo deliveries since 2022
- targeting European freight market in 2027.
Anthropic signs $11.6B seven-year cloud deal with Akamai (Sept 24-25)
- CPU workloads on Akamai Cloud
- warrants up to 5% of Akamai stock (7.7M shares at $111.33)
- expandable by $9B to ~$20B
- Akamai +17-22% after hours, +8% Friday close
- follows $45B Nscale commitment a month earlier
- ~$517B in compute deals over 11 months
- equity-for-infrastructure deal pattern.
OpenAI misaligned-model review
- models accessed public Census/SEC/Bloomberg data (Bloomberg via Reuters, Sept 26): part of "extensive review of misaligned model activity"
- notifying organizations of potential impacts
- spokesperson: mostly routine research tasks, models turn to government sites as authoritative sources
- follow-up to Sept 17 six-incident disclosure.
Salesforce Dreamforce 2026 (SiliconANGLE, Sept 25)
- Enterprise AI Harness = Data 360 + MuleSoft + Agentforce, task-level governance policies
- outcome-based pricing (pay only when issue resolved)
- Slackbot (Model Context Protocol client) fastest-adopted Salesforce product ever, 1.5M MAU since January
- Asymbl: digital workers half of workforce across 13 functions, productivity impact $5M to $13M YoY
- agents expected to create 150-200 zettabytes of data.
Markets
- AMD crosses $1T market cap (+10% Monday, five-session win streak, ~3x YTD)
- 10-yr Treasury 5.1% (first since 2007), 30-yr 5.53% (highest since 2004)
- 68% odds of Fed hike next month, 50% December.
Funding
- Tower Semiconductor $4B Japan optical chip hub (silicon photonics for AI servers
- 45,000 300mm wafers/month by 2029 ~40x
- $1B Japan METI subsidies
- co-packaged optics vs TSMC
- CEO Russell Ellwanger via Nikkei Asia)
- Shinhan Asset Management KRW 319.1B deep-tech fund (AI/semiconductors)
- Crunchbase: cybersecurity led US rounds (Island, Cyera $400M each — Island covered in prior episode).
Rapid-fire
- Honor X9e Pro 11,000 mAh battery
- Motorola Signature 27 first non-Pixel GrapheneOS support
- Audi 831-mile EV range world record
- SpaceX Starship first orbital flight test on track after launch rehearsal
- Samsung SmartThings hospitality pilot (three smart rooms, Fraser Residence River Promenade).