Tech News · The field notes
Personal Tech — Tuesday, October 6, 2026
AMD promises a major 2027 supply ramp as Goldman lifts TSMC; Etched fields forty to fifty billion dollar bids; DeepSeek nears a twelve billion dollar raise; Vinci and Hadrian raise; Google buys nuclear uprates.
AMD CEO Lisa Su in Taipei (Oct 6)
- will substantially increase chip supply in 2027 as AI demand exceeds supply
- met Foxconn, due to meet TSMC, working with memory suppliers ahead of South Korea visit (Samsung/SK Hynix)
- Q2 Data Center revenue $6.7B up 107% YoY
- market value recently topped $1T
- planning 3-5 years out, needs more advanced wafer capacity.
Goldman Sachs raises TSMC target price NT$3,100 to NT$3,300, raises 2027/2028 capex forecasts to $85B/$98B (from $78B/$82B)
- expects TSMC revenue growth 42.0% in 2026 and 36.9% in 2027, gross margins 67.2%/67.5%
- "stronger CPU demand driven by Agentic AI is the key change over the past year."
Etched fielding investment offers at $40B-$50B valuation (TechCrunch, Oct 5), roughly double the $21B September round (Jane Street led $700M), after $10.3B July round (Sequoia led $300M); claims $1B customer orders (July), Jane Street is investor and early customer that took delivery; ~400 employees, ~15% ex-Nvidia; 10MW Silicon Valley data center; co-founders Gavin Uberti and Chris Zhu, COO Robert Wachen.
DeepSeek close to raising at least 80B yuan (~$11.93B), possibly approaching 100B yuan (Bloomberg via Reuters, Oct 6)
- CATL and Tencent among largest backers
- initially sought ~50B yuan
- recently partnered with Huawei on Ascend-chip programming tools
- released DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash last month
- hired CITIC Securities for potential STAR Market IPO.
Vinci raises $250M at $1.5B valuation (Reuters, Oct 6)
- Palo Alto AI physics-simulation software for chip/hardware design (thermal first, expanding to whole systems, vibration, electromagnetics)
- Advent, Temasek, Xora Innovation led
- Eclipse, Khosla Ventures, Madrona participated
- 70-person startup
- CEO Hardik Kabaria.
Hadrian raises $40M (total $65M) for agentic AI offensive security platform (Business Wire, Oct 6)
- co-led by Forgepoint Capital International and SmartFin
- expanding across EMEA and U.S.
- humans set mission/decisions, AI does work in between
- only 0.47% of scanner findings genuinely exploitable per company framing.
Google and Constellation Energy deal (MarketWatch, Oct 6)
- 890 MW new nuclear capacity via uprates at existing Illinois sites (equivalent to a new reactor) plus a 15-year agreement covering additional 2,700 MW
- Constellation shares up 7% premarket.
Comparables.ai (Helsinki) raises $6M seed for AI-powered M&A intelligence platform
- co-led by Pragmatech and Araya Ventures
- 370M+ companies covered
- 50,000+ professionals in 30+ countries.