DISCOVER THE FUTURE
Big money. Bigger moves.
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People familiar with the matter told The Information that SpaceX’s AI group laid off about 60 employees from the Grok Imagine video and image team in the past week, leaving a small crew to keep the product running as the company shifts toward coding tools and Grok Bot.
Elon Musk said on X on November 14 that future Starship flights will each carry over 50 Tb/s of Starlink bandwidth to orbit. Official Starlink figures put today’s Flight 15 load of 26 V3 satellites at up to 26 terabits of capacity, or about 26 Tbps at 1 Tbps per satellite. Musk’s target is roughly double that, or more than 50 V3-class satellites in one flight.
China's 2026 national reimbursement drug list, released Nov. 14, admits JW Therapeutics' CAR-T therapy Carteyva to basic medical insurance via the new commercial innovative-drug list, the first CAR-T to get there. The list adds 107 drugs and takes effect Jan. 1, 2027.
After Jensen Huang resigned on Nov. 12, NBC News reported that Nvidia’s independent directors plan to keep investigating him. House committees asked him to appear for a closed-door interview on Dec. 1, and the Senate Banking Committee asked him to testify on Dec. 3, with subpoena threats if he does not. The board told CNBC it has not yet selected a search firm or formally engaged candidates.
OpenAI has disbanded its stand-alone robotics team, Fortune reported and OpenAI confirmed. Researchers move under Chief Research Officer Mark Chen, and applied robotics and hardware staff move to Greg Brockman's Applied organization. OpenAI says general models like GPT-6 Astra can now handle some robot tasks directly, so it no longer needs a separate robot brain.
Four US nonprofits sued five leading AI companies in San Francisco on Nov. 12, asking a judge to freeze development and deployment of more advanced AI models under California's Unfair Competition Law. Earlier AI lawsuits mostly sought damages over copyright or individual harm; this one asks the court to hit pause on the frontier itself.
SpaceX and Tesla are making progress in merger talks, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter. Boards and advisers are working out deal terms and governance, and an announcement could come as soon as December or slip to early 2027. At current valuations it would be the biggest corporate deal ever.
In an interview posted on the company intranet on Nov. 12, Mercedes-Benz executives said the board has decided to stop all further investment in its German sites and will examine "concretely and in detail" which German locations it can still afford, after cost-cutting talks with the works council and the IG Metall union stalled.
On its third-quarter 2026 earnings call, Chinese chipmaker SMIC said AI computing demand is outstripping supply and that the industry expects foundry capacity to be very tight in 2027, possibly into the second half of 2028. SMIC expects full-year revenue above $12 billion, up nearly 30%. Third-quarter revenue rose 28.1% year over year to 21.98 billion yuan, while demand for phones and low-end consumer electronics stayed weak.
On Nov. 12 at 11:08 a.m. EST, SpaceX laid out plans for two "supercompute" campuses: more than $24 billion near its Starbase site in Texas and about $50 billion in Cochise County, Arizona, for a total above $74 billion. SpaceX says the Arizona site would draw up to 6 gigawatts, include 24 gigawatt-hours of battery storage and use no industrial water. The Arizona project still needs county approval, and residents and environmental groups near the Texas site have raised concerns.
JD.com said in a Hong Kong exchange filing on Nov. 12 that it has completed its voluntary public takeover offer for German consumer-electronics retailer Ceconomy, paying €1.335 billion for 59.8% of the shares and voting rights. Ceconomy is now a JD.com subsidiary. Together with a partner’s stake, the combined holding is 85.2%. The companies say European stores will keep operating independently, with no planned staff changes.
NVIDIA's board said on Nov. 12 that co-founder Jensen Huang has resigned as president, CEO and director, effective immediately. CFO Colette Kress will serve as interim CEO while remaining CFO, and Harvey C. Jones becomes the company's first board chair. The official statement gives no reason. IT Home reported the stock once fell about 14% during U.S. trading.
Secondhand meeting notes circulated on Nov. 11 said Anthropic told sell-side analysts its compute contract with SpaceX won't run past mid-2027. Elon Musk replied on X: "We would be happy to take the compute back. No problem. But I think the opposite is going to happen." Anthropic's IPO filing puts the deals at up to $120.5 billion through 2029, about $3.1 billion a month once fully delivered, with 90-day exit rights after the non-cancelable periods. Anthropic has not publicly confirmed any termination.
Alibaba told the Hong Kong stock exchange on Nov. 10 that it plans to spin off its wholly owned chip subsidiary T-Head for a standalone Main Board listing; T-Head filed confidentially on Sept. 11. Size, structure and Alibaba's remaining stake are undecided, and the deal still needs exchange approval and a filing with China's securities regulator.
On Nov. 12, Baidu's Robin Li unveiled Token Exchange at Baidu World 2026, a marketplace listing many AI models and providers, including rivals DeepSeek, Kimi and GLM. It uses entry tests, model fingerprinting and ongoing monitoring to catch swapped models and inflated specs, and gives providers credit ratings. Baidu says that a month in, it has over 100 supply sources and handles more than 700 billion tokens a day. The platform had quietly gone live earlier.
Chip research firm SemiAnalysis said on X on Nov. 11 that SpaceX is developing "Kessel," a custom version of Nvidia's Vera Rubin NVL72 rack. It replaces internal NVLink copper cables with an 84-layer passive circuit board, and SpaceX would buy only chip packages from Nvidia, skipping Nvidia's L6 compute boards and sourcing the rest itself, for data centers on the ground and in orbit. Neither company has commented publicly.
South Korea's Financial News on Nov. 11 published what it said was the Q&A from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's Oct. 31 session with Samsung executives. Altman reportedly said the coming AI companion device will be "the next version of the smartphone," with AI rather than apps proactively managing people's lives, and that he'd like to work closely with Samsung on a joint device. Neither company has announced any partnership.
ByteDance plans to release an AI assistant similar to Meta's Muse in the coming weeks, Bloomberg reported Nov. 11, citing people familiar with the matter. At an all-hands meeting of the AI team, co-founder Zhang Yiming reportedly said ByteDance can compete with Anthropic and OpenAI at the frontier, but not until at least 2029 or 2030, conceded that its Seed models are pretrained on datasets orders of magnitude smaller than U.S. rivals', and said the company should not lean on distillation. Bloomberg also reported a plan to spend up to $70 billion to make Seedance China's top video AI platform. ByteDance did not respond to a request for comment; none of this is an official company announcement.