Golden Hour recap, Oct. 28: Anthropic's S-1, Alphabet's miss and 35 stories

Aurelia Crown: Good evening. Wednesday, October 28, gave us 35 stories, and this table covers every one. We start with the most magnificent prospectus of the season. Anthropic's seven founders keep 50.1% of voting power through Founder LLC. The S-1 sizes knowledge work at more than $40 trillion a year. And Anthropic holds $131.7 billion in cash and investments before the IPO.

Hari Sterne: The $40 trillion is what knowledge workers produced globally in 2025, per the filing. It is not Anthropic's revenue. The cash is $112.4 billion plus $19.3 billion in short-term investments as of June 30. The prospectus also warns Founder LLC gives the founders "the ability to determine the outcome of all matters submitted to a vote of our stockholders generally for the foreseeable future."

Zola Kade: Nothing to install there. Alphabet reported, which is where the day got interesting.

Aurelia Crown: Revenue of $127.58 billion missed the $128.22 billion estimate, and shares slid in extended trading. Yet Sundar Pichai says Alphabet is on a half-trillion annual revenue run rate. Google Cloud grew 103%, and Google will sell TPUs into Oracle Cloud from 2027, the first time they are sold into another company's data center.

Hari Sterne: Earnings per share were $2.12 against a $3.02 estimate. Operating profit rose while net profit fell, and the reporting does not say why. Outlets also disagree on the share drop: 7% at CNBC, more than 9% at Reuters.

Zola Kade: Nearly 100 customers are on those TPUs. Google also put ads in AI Mode internationally. Per Crypto Briefing: no placement controls, no separate reporting, no opt-out.

Aurelia Crown: And Gemini 4 Carbon tops the Artificial Analysis index at 59, the company says.

Hari Sterne: With a 0.0% attack success rate on Gray Swan's injection benchmark. Those are Google's claims, and the cyber ones need checking. Meanwhile Google's AI search declined to name the 2020 election winner for US users and pointed to the FEC and National Archives. The reporting does not identify the rule behind that refusal.

Aurelia Crown: Now Redmond. Microsoft's capex hit $45.2 billion, under its own $50 billion guide, and free cash flow reached $18.6 billion against an $8.54 billion consensus.

Zola Kade: It also stretched the depreciable life of long-term data center leases from 15 to 25 years. Another $329.1 billion in leases have not commenced.

Hari Sterne: And the OpenAI line: $10 billion in quarterly revenue, nearly 11% of the total, plus $7.2 billion in receivables. The payment terms are not disclosed.

Aurelia Crown: Oracle, ever the optimist, targets $30 billion in free cash flow in fiscal 2029 after capex peaks in FY27 and FY28. And Nscale seeks a $30 billion IPO valuation and aims to raise about $3 billion.

Hari Sterne: On a $1.02 billion first-half net loss.

Aurelia Crown: Nvidia had a full day. Reuters reports the DOJ is asking questions about the $12.93 billion Hugging Face deal, which Nvidia says should close in the first half of 2027.

Zola Kade: On the shelf: RTX Spark laptops from six makers, up to 128GB of unified memory. And Nemotron 3.5 Transcribe, open weights, 30 billion parameters, 40 languages.

Aurelia Crown: Dealmaking, too. Bloomberg reports Marvell is in advanced talks to buy Lumentum, valued at about $221 billion and $83 billion respectively. That is a rumor, and the reporting gives no proposed price or financing structure.

Hari Sterne: Memory is where the money is parked. SK hynix says demand will outstrip supply through 2030, with an 80% operating margin and 14 customers covering over half of 2027 and 2028 capacity. Reuters reports CXMT plans HBM3E at 20% to 30% yields, against about 70% at SK hynix.

Zola Kade: Chips also move the hard way. Malaysian customs seized 30 AI chip servers worth $12.1 million at Kuala Lumpur airport on October 15.

Aurelia Crown: Venture capital, glorious as ever. Infisical raised $40 million at $600 million to secure agent credentials. Upwind raised $400 million at $3.8 billion in a Bessemer-led round. Foundry raised $100 million for autonomous factories, according to The Information.

Zola Kade: Agents got wallets and plugins. Shopify's Shop Pay now works inside AI agents using Visa, Mastercard and Discover tokens. The ServiceNow MCP plugin is live in OpenAI's marketplace.

Hari Sterne: Then the science. Axiom's agents formalized the classification of finite simple groups in Lean: about 43.1 million lines in 24 days. No outside party has reproduced it yet. In an unreviewed study, 1,946 GPT-Rosalind agents analyzed mouse brain data in 32 minutes. Anthropic says Claude made about 35,000 antibody designs for a food allergy program, and three removed more IgE than omalizumab.

Aurelia Crown: Government made its entrance. Britain adds £120 million to its AI Security Institute, while the US counterpart runs on $10 million to $15 million a year. New York's governor signed a chatbot law for minors with penalties up to $25,000 per violation. And OpenAI put hundreds of staff in an election war room ahead of the midterms.

Hari Sterne: Less glamorous: 45 of 203 Home Office asylum AI summaries failed expert checks. The Open Rights Group estimates experts reviewed only 0.3% of the summaries produced between April and July.

Zola Kade: An xAI subsidiary reportedly offers to buy Southaven homes if residents skip the noise lawsuit.

Aurelia Crown: Finally, dead startups as training suppliers. Google's $10 million winning bid for Spirit Airlines' data faced a $12.5 million challenge from Micro1.

Zola Kade: One for the download folder. Tencent open-sourced Hy-Nomas, an 8B world model under Apache-2.0. In low-memory mode, one RTX 4090 made a 100-second video at 20.53 GiB peak.

Aurelia Crown: Thirty-five stories, one gilded table. Good night.

On the desk, not published

Stories we weighed that day and did not run, with the reason. Unconfirmed until someone confirms them.

• FuriosaAI raises funding at a $2.9 billion valuation. Reported by Bloomberg Tech. One outlet had it, no primary source to confirm.
• OpenAI reportedly plans to buy Google's AI chips. Reported by Reuters via Investing.com, Business Standard (Bloomberg), The Information. A sourced rumor that did not make the Fool's Gold slots.
• ASM International raises 2027 revenue target as AI demand lifts sales. Reported by ASM International, Bloomberg Tech, Bloomberg. Written, but it did not get past our standards editor.
• AI math advances prompt new concerns about encryption. Reported by FT AI, Scientific American, Defense One. Written, but it did not get past our standards editor.
• ServiceNow shares fall as sales outlook revives AI disruption concerns. Reported by ServiceNow Investor Relations, Bloomberg Tech, The Information. Written, but held back without a usable photo.
• Cognition weighs funding round after higher valuation offers. Reported by Business Insider, GMT EIGHT. Rumor with no readable named outlet behind it.
• Report says Chinese AI labs used OpenAI’s Astra to train models. Reported by The Information. Rumor with no readable named outlet behind it.
• Banks delay $15 billion loan sale tied to Anthropic data center. Reported by Bloomberg Tech. Only a paywalled headline, not confirmed by a readable source.

The desk read 668 items, evaluated 151 stories and published 35.