Technology & Science

WASHINGTON — U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that Alice Huang, the Chinese head of Singapore data-center company Megaspeed, had ties to Chinese intelligence, according to a Thursday New York Times report summarized by a Hungarian newsletter. The Times reportedly said President Trump was briefed about a year ago and took no action, partly to avoid disrupting Nvidia chip sales. Megaspeed has reportedly bought at least $4.8 billion of Nvidia hardware. The suspicion is that it rented computing capacity to Chinese firms including Alibaba, and that some chips may have reached China illegally. Nvidia says its chief executive's customer meetings are routine and that customers receive no national-security information. Megaspeed has opened an internal review, and China has called the claims slander. The account has not been independently confirmed here.

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Intel reported third-quarter revenue of $16.5 billion on October 29, up 21% from a year earlier. Earnings per share were $0.60 on a GAAP basis and $0.52 adjusted. The chipmaker said the results beat its own guidance for revenue, gross margin and earnings. Chief financial officer David Zinsner said data-center revenue grew at its strongest rate in 15 years. For the fourth quarter Intel forecast revenue of $15.0 billion to $16.0 billion, below the third-quarter figure, and adjusted earnings of $0.25 per share. CEO Lip-Bu Tan cited near-term headwinds across the PC industry. He said the priority is unlocking more supply to meet what he called extraordinary demand for Xeon server processors. A preview cited by one analyst note had expected fourth-quarter revenue near $17 billion.

COSTA MESA, Calif. — Defense contractor Anduril and Qualcomm announced BlueChip on Tuesday, a computer line meant to rebuild U.S. computer manufacturing. It starts with a laptop for government, defense, first-responder and public-safety customers. The machine will use Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Series processor. Anduril says it has working prototypes and plans to take orders in 2027. Circuit-board assembly is planned at its Arsenal-1 plant in Ohio, which also builds drones for the Air Force. The companies describe a phased plan: first more domestic sourcing, then less reliance on foreign suppliers, and eventually an end-to-end American supply chain. Founder Palmer Luckey told DefenseScoop that the work resembles what the company already does. He said production is currently a very small line making small quantities to refine the manufacturing process.

OpenAI has lowered the size of its latest funding round by roughly $10 billion, Bloomberg and TechCrunch reported. The Financial Times, as relayed by trackers, puts the revised target at about $20 billion, down from $30 billion. It also reports the implied valuation falling from about $1.4 trillion to $1.25 trillion. Subscriptions were due last Friday, and the same reports say some investors cut their allocations. OpenAI has not published figures for the round, so the numbers rest on press reports. The cut comes during a sharp tech selloff, with semiconductor shares in bear-market territory and Bloomberg citing S&P's move to a negative outlook on Meta over AI spending. OpenAI told employees it expects to be public in 2027, according to CNBC.

MEMPHIS — A federal judge has denied a motion by SpaceX to dismiss the NAACP's Clean Air Act lawsuit over gas-fired turbines that power AI data centers in the Greater Memphis area, TechCrunch and other outlets reported. The suit was filed in April 2026 against xAI, before it was folded into SpaceX. SpaceX has since taken operational responsibility for the facilities. The opinion came late Friday. About two weeks earlier, the same court refused a Justice Department request to end the proceedings. The order lets the plaintiffs try to prove their claims. It does not establish that the company violated the law. The case now moves to full litigation, and no trial date has been reported. Separately, an xAI subsidiary is offering to buy homes in Southaven in exchange for lawsuit releases.

OpenAI's release notes say GPT-6 Rosalind Research went out on October 30 for multistep life-sciences work, with safeguards built for biological use. It is not a general release. It is rolling out to a limited set of approved Research customers in ChatGPT Work, Codex and the API, and it is absent from the standard Chat tab. Organizations need Rosalind Research approval, and a separate Discovery approval does not grant access. Trackers report that the model relaxes refusals on some dual-use biology queries under a trusted-access arrangement. They also cite large gains on OpenAI's own internal benchmarks, but no independent evaluation has been published. A day earlier, OpenAI separately changed GPT-6 in Chat to give shorter answers and less flattery. On October 26 it released GPT-6.1 Terra at $1 per million input tokens and $5 per million output tokens.

NEW YORK — Reply briefs are due November 6 on cross-motions for summary judgment in the New York Times case against OpenAI and Microsoft, part of a multidistrict litigation before Judge Sidney Stein in Manhattan. The motions were filed in September. They ask the court to decide whether training AI models on copyrighted articles is fair use, a question no court has resolved in this case. The Justice Department filed a statement of interest on September 2 backing OpenAI's position. No trial date is set, and a trial would follow only for claims that survive summary judgment. Other courts have gone different ways. In September the Third Circuit held in Thomson Reuters v. Ross that using Westlaw headnotes to train an AI tool was not fair use. Those rulings are the closest appellate precedent so far.

BOSTON — The New England Journal of Medicine published an interim analysis of RAINIER, a phase 3 trial of Vertex Pharmaceuticals' povetacicept in IgA nephropathy, a kidney disease driven by immune-complex deposits. The paper went online October 23 and the data were presented at the American Society of Nephrology's Kidney Week. The week-36 analysis found consistent reductions in urinary protein across patient subgroups, including a 54.2% greater reduction in the urine protein-to-creatinine ratio than placebo among North American participants. Vertex reports no serious adverse events related to the drug and no deaths. Vertex describes RAINIER as the largest IgAN trial to date, and the drug is dosed by autoinjector every four weeks. Proteinuria is a surrogate marker, and this is an interim readout from a company-funded study. A Biologics License Application has been accepted by the FDA.

ERBIL, Iraq — Researchers led by Emma Pomeroy of the University of Cambridge report that a Neanderthal known as Shanidar A may have died from a wooden spear thrust through the chest about 75,000 years ago. The remains were excavated at Shanidar Cave in Iraqi Kurdistan, and the study appeared in Scientific Reports. A round hole about 15 millimeters wide in the left shoulder blade is the key evidence. The team says the spear entered at the front and passed through the lung and likely major arteries. They say this may be the earliest known lethal spear attack on a human ancestor. The authors call the strike possibly intentional but say a hunting accident cannot be excluded. A healed facial injury suggests the individual, about 45 years old, survived earlier trauma, perhaps with help from others, and was then deliberately buried. The conclusions are interpretive, drawn from a single skeleton.

WRIGHT-PATTERSON AIR FORCE BASE, Ohio — The Air Force Research Laboratory says it has recovered cargo pods that flew on a SpaceX Starfall reentry capsule and splashed down in the Pacific. The capsule rode on the Bandwagon-5 rideshare Falcon 9, which lifted off from Cape Canaveral on Oct. 20. The pods held representative gear, including a satellite-linked tracker, batteries, a desalinator and emergency medical supplies. Sensors recorded temperature, shock and vibration through launch, reentry and splashdown. The lab also fit-checked a life raft inside the capsule for possible future tests. According to a Federal Aviation Administration environmental assessment, Starfall is about 3.1 meters across and can return up to 1,000 kilograms. A trade report notes the lab has not released test results or said whether the cargo met requirements. The lab says it is also assessing vendors such as Blue Origin and Rocket Lab and plans further tests.

NASA's two ESCAPADE spacecraft are scheduled to return to Earth this month and use its gravity to slingshot toward Mars. They launched on Blue Origin's New Glenn on Nov. 13, 2025. Since then they have looped around the Sun-Earth L2 point, about a million miles out, a route designed to let Mars-bound craft launch outside the usual two-year window. NASA's mission pages give only the month for the flyby and the related trans-Mars engine burn, not a specific date. If the flyby succeeds, the probes arrive in September 2027. They would then become the first coordinated pair of orbiters around another planet. They will study how the solar wind strips Mars's atmosphere. The University of California, Berkeley leads the mission, and Rocket Lab built the spacecraft.