⛵ Salesforce Agrees to Buy Cresta
Plus: Fal Doubles Valuation to $16B, Marvell Agrees to Buy Lumentum
Good Morning, Early Adopters!
In San Francisco, the check-writing season is open again.
Big Tech at the Close | Tue, Nov 3 |
Company | Price | 1 Day | Mkt Cap | |
 | Amazon AMZN | $250.69 | +2.06% | 2.71T |
 | Apple AAPL | $331.90 | −1.90% | 4.84T |
 | Google GOOGL | $280.03 | +0.37% | 3.44T |
 | Meta META | $621.03 | +2.36% | 1.59T |
 | Microsoft MSFT | $520.99 | +2.74% | 3.87T |
 | NVIDIA NVDA | $206.69 | +2.29% | 4.99T |
 | SpaceX SPCX | $141.31 | +3.62% | 1.92T |
 | Tesla TSLA | $398.50 | −1.32% | 1.58T |
Salesforce Agrees to Buy Cresta
TL;DR: Salesforce signed a definitive agreement to acquire Cresta, whose voice and chat agents automate customer service and assist contact center staff. The Information reported a $2.7 billion price. Salesforce plans to bring Cresta’s conversational tools into Agentforce and Service Cloud. Read more →
Fal Doubles Valuation to $16B
TL;DR: Fal announced $1.65 billion across two funding rounds. Sequoia led the earlier Series E, and Bessemer led the $1.3 billion Series F with participation from NVIDIA. The latest round values the provider of image, video and audio model inference at $16 billion, up from $8 billion in April. Read more →
Marvell Agrees to Buy Lumentum
TL;DR: Marvell agreed to acquire optical components maker Lumentum in an all-stock deal with an implied enterprise value of $115 billion for Lumentum. The proposed combination brings Marvell’s custom silicon and connectivity products together with Lumentum’s lasers and optical components used in AI data centers. Read more →
Anthropic Posts $17B Quarter
TL;DR: Anthropic’s amended IPO filing reports $17 billion in third-quarter revenue, up about 47% from the prior quarter. It separately discloses about $895.4 billion in aggregate commitments under purchase and lease agreements, substantially all for compute and infrastructure. Read more →
AMD Data Center Revenue Jumps 97%
TL;DR: AMD reported record third-quarter revenue of $13.4 billion, up 45% year over year. Data center revenue rose 97% to $8.5 billion, driven by demand for EPYC server processors and Instinct accelerators. Shares rose about 8% in extended trading after the report. Read more →
NVIDIA Eyes Backstop for Anthropic Campus
TL;DR: NVIDIA is reportedly in talks to guarantee debt for the first building Anthropic contracted at Nscale’s Monarch campus in West Virginia. The Information estimates the proposed backstop at more than $5 billion, covering financing for construction and power infrastructure. Read more →
SpaceX Eyes 13 GW of Data Center Capacity
TL;DR: SemiAnalysis reports that SpaceX has revised its 2027 data center capacity estimate to about 13 gigawatts. The analysts tracked roughly 3.6 gigawatts under construction across multiple sites and argue the buildout could make SpaceX a major AI cloud provider. Read more →
Anthropic Uses Claude to Design Chips
TL;DR: Anthropic told IPO investors that its 15-person chip design team is using Claude to develop custom AI chips, The Information reported. The team estimated that Claude speeds up engineering work compared with conventional chip design workflows. Read more →
OpenAI Engineers Design a Device With Astra
TL;DR: Two OpenAI team members used GPT-6 Astra to design a test device in under a week. A contract manufacturer built a small batch of prototypes in under a month. Getting the design ready for manufacturing required several rounds of review to address production limits, tolerances and assembly details. Read more →
OpenAI Internal Model Leads on BenchCAD 2.0
TL;DR: OpenAI reports that an unnamed internal model scored 0.875 on BenchCAD 2.0, compared with 0.594 for GPT-6 Astra at its highest reasoning setting. The evaluation covers tasks such as reconstructing 3D parts and assemblies and identifying connections on printed circuit boards. Read more →
Stanford Launches Digital Brain Project
TL;DR: Stanford launched a project to build foundation models that predict human brain activity. Researchers plan to combine high-resolution scans from a 7-tesla MRI with millisecond measurements from a wearable MEG system, capturing where and when brain activity unfolds. Read more →
Experiment Supports a Route to Topological Qubits
TL;DR: University of Cologne researchers observed Andreev states behaving as predicted at a junction between a topological insulator and a superconductor. The result supports a proposed route toward more robust qubits. The team still needs to measure whether the energy gap closes and reopens as predicted. Read more →
July Ruling Denied Interim Relief to Meta Workers
TL;DR: In July, a federal judge denied a temporary restraining order sought by Meta workers who alleged the company used AI to select employees for layoffs. Meta denied using AI for the decisions. The judge asked Meta to explain its selection of four workers whose immigration status could be affected. Read more →
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