Tech News · The field notes
Personal Tech — Monday, October 5, 2026
Huawei and Qualcomm sign a landmark 5G and AI patent deal; Tencent's reported seven billion dollar Oracle chip lease; Nvidia nears a record on Foxconn's AI server boom; New York City puts AI executives under oath; the FTC quietly probes consumer harms; plus Pandektes, Fleuret AI, and Satlyt.
Huawei and Qualcomm sign broad multiyear patent cross-license covering 5G, AI, compute and networking (announced Oct 5)
- Huawei's first 5G patent deal with Qualcomm
- Qualcomm purchases some Huawei U.S. patents
- Huawei says total patent-licensing agreement value now exceeds $6.9B
- deal subject to regulatory/FTC review
- follows August HP Wi-Fi cross-license.
Tencent reportedly leases access to ~100,000 advanced AI chips via Oracle data centers in Southeast Asia in a ~$7B, five-year deal with ~30% upfront (FT via Reuters, Oct 5): offshore cloud leasing as a permitted route around direct chip export controls; Tencent Q2 capex up 176% YoY to 53B yuan on AI infrastructure.
Nvidia nears a record high as partner Foxconn posts September-quarter revenue of 3.03 trillion New Taiwan dollars (~$95.5B), up 47% year over year on AI server demand; DBS argues AI stocks are not in a bubble, citing Nvidia's ~17x forward price-to-earnings ratio and fiscal Q2 revenue of $96.2B (up 106% YoY, ~$89B from data centers).
New York City Council AI hearing on Oct 5
- OpenAI, Google and Anthropic agreed to testify only after subpoena threats from Speaker Julie Menin
- Meta agreed early
- Elon Musk's SpaceXAI did not respond and was subpoenaed
- hearing covers AI safety incidents and proposed legislation.
FTC consumer-protection investigation into OpenAI, Anthropic and other AI companies (confirmed by Oct 3)
- civil investigative demands under a November 2023 resolution
- investigation, not a lawsuit
- no complaint, settlement or timeline
- distinct from the 2024 Section 6(b) competition study of the Microsoft-OpenAI, Amazon-Anthropic and Google-Anthropic deals.
Copenhagen-based Pandektes raises 13.5 million euros in Series A funding (Oct 5) to build the data infrastructure for AI-powered legal research.
Paris-based Fleuret AI raises 4 million euros in pre-seed funding (Oct 5) to automate penetration testing with AI agents for enterprise offensive security.
Satlyt closes an 8 million dollar seed round (announced Oct 1, updated Oct 5)
- software platform to run and split AI workloads across fleets of satellites built by others
- Sunnyvale and Nairobi team led by ex-Google and SpaceX founder Rama Afullo
- software set to fly this week on a SpaceX rideshare alongside Google's Project Suncatcher prototype.