Tech News · The field notes
Personal Tech — Thursday, November 12, 2026
Nvidia's CEO scandal rattles Chinese AI firms, Anthropic's IPO is oversubscribed with pricing set for November 18, Fractile raises $720M for memory-first AI chips, plus DeepMind's AlphaGenome 2, IBM's quantum roadmap, and New York's RAISE Act registration.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang scandal (NYT/Reuters Nov 12)
- US authorities concluded Alice Huang, ex-Megaspeed exec, was a Chinese intelligence asset
- Huang admitted infidelity
- Nvidia board investigating, removal reportedly on the table
- Chinese AI firms rushing to rent Nvidia capacity outside China fearing tighter curbs
- Remote Access Security Act (RASA) could close remote-access loophole, House passed 369-22 in Jan, awaits Senate
- Chinese AI shares fell in Hong Kong (Alibaba -7.1%, Z.AI, MiniMax -7%+)
- follows Nov 11 report of PLA-linked university buying restricted Nvidia H200 chips
Anthropic IPO (Nov 12)
- official IPO page live
- pricing Nov 18, Nasdaq debut Nov 19, ticker ANT
- Bloomberg: multiple times oversubscribed, up to $90.4B raise via IPO + private placement, valuation near $1.4T
- Q3 revenue $17B (12x YoY), 11,900+ customers paying $100K+, 15% adjusted operating margin, $23.3B net loss incl $21.9B non-cash charge
- private placement: Google $10B, Nvidia $10B, AMD $2.5B, Broadcom/Micron/Microsoft $1B each, TSMC up to $500M
- +$10B Microsoft/Google cloud commitments thru 2033 (Azure $49.2B, Google Cloud $121.6B total)
- Lambda $35B deal may be cancelled after missed deadline
- price range $70-$78, FT: bankers may lift top end toward $1.5T
Funding
- Fractile (London, memory-first AI inference chips) $720M Series C at $7B valuation, led by Lightspeed/Founders Fund/Thrive/Redpoint, CapitalG/BlackRock/UK sovereign AI fund in
- UForce (Ukraine-founded drones) $700M at $6B, Valor + UK National Wealth Fund co-led, US-Ukraine Reconstruction Investment Fund in
- SoftBank backs Agile Robots (German humanoids) $500M at $8.5B valuation
DeepMind AlphaGenome 2 (Nov 11)
- DNA model predicts variant effects per individual cell type/state, trained on 107M+ cell profiles across 68 tissues
- research use only, not clinically validated
IBM Nighthawk r3 quantum processor (Nov 11)
- 520 programmable qubits, 2,034 physical qubits, 10,000 operations
- 2027 plan to link two into 1,040-qubit system
- Nighthawk r2 ran 34B circuits since Sept
- r3 a design target, not yet built
New York RAISE Act registration portal opened Nov 10
- frontier developers >$500M annual revenue must register by Jan 1, 2027, publish safety frameworks, report critical incidents within 72 hours, issue transparency reports
- fines up to $1M first / $3M subsequent
- enforced by Office of DIGIT
- NY Center for AI Responsibility and Research at SUNY Binghamton launched
- follows California SB 53
OpenAI
- Businesses in ChatGPT beta (1.2B weekly users)
- acquired Odessia AI travel agent (booked $60M travel last summer, founded by Sonder's Francis Davidson)
- Q3 revenue reportedly >$10B record
- GPT-6.2 Astra rumored in Codex repo/cloud quota pages — UNCONFIRMED
Rapid-fire
- Nebuly $21M Series A led by Planven (ROI measurement for enterprise AI agents)
- Helix $6.2M led by Chicago Ventures (voice-powered human verification)
- Araceli Biosciences $4.5M (cellular imaging, used by 10 of top 20 pharma)
- custom AI chip tally: 21 named across Google/Amazon/Microsoft/Meta/OpenAI, 10 in service, incl Microsoft Maia 200 running Copilot