Personal Tech — Thursday, October 15, 2026

FTC sends civil subpoenas to OpenAI and Anthropic (Axios, Oct 14/15)

• 50+ page demands on safety incidents, safeguards, marketing, privacy
• execs incl. METR to testify
• Chairman Ferguson says devs ordering hacks in cyber tests should be liable. Separate: 8 state AGs coming after OpenAI over child safety.

TSMC Q3 record (Oct 15)

• revenue $46.72B (+50.9% YoY, beat $44.6-45.8B guidance), net profit ~$23.55B (+68.7%)
• 6th straight record quarter
• 11th straight growth quarter. Stock fell 3.4% anyway on hot US September CPI (3.7% YoY) reviving Oct Fed hike bets
• chip selloff: AMD -5.73%, Micron -4.1%, SK Hynix -6%+, ASML -2%, Nvidia -3.2% to $221.30. KOSPI -8%+ intraday, tripped market-wide circuit breaker
• Samsung -5.29%, SK Hynix -8.36%. CoreWeave bonds near 15% yields
• raising $2B via convertibles (up to $2.3B).

Ramp raises $1.85B at $60B valuation (Reuters, Oct 15)

• led by Dragoneer, co-led Thrive/Founders Fund/Sands/Avenir, Fidelity/T. Rowe/GIC/Coatue
• 85K+ companies, $275B+ annualized purchase volume (+175% YoY), >$2B annualized revenue, positive cash flow
• up from $44B in June
• AI tools for monitoring AI spend.

Modal $750M Series D at $15.75B (Oct 14, Accel-led)

• 3x May Series C ($4.65B)
• usage tripled since May, 15x YoY growth, >$1B annualized run rate (CEO Erik Bernhardsson blog).

Rapid-fire

• Mueon $65M Series A (Portland, Maverick Silicon-led, Intel Capital
• modular AI/hyperscale computing platform). DexForce ~$147M Series B at $1B+ valuation (Chinese humanoid robot sim-to-real training
• customers Toyota, Samsung, Panasonic, Foxconn
• Hong Kong IPO under consideration). Microsoft Maia 300 AI chip unveiled (40% more tokens/megawatt vs GPUs, production 2027).

Quirky close

• Jensen Huang (Bloomberg interview) would consider halting chip supplies to customers developing unsafe AI
• also says AI infra demand will exceed component supply for years.

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