Tech News · The field notes
Personal Tech — Thursday, November 5, 2026
Nvidia's H200 chips pile up in Hong Kong, Qualcomm pivots to data centers as phone chips slump, Oracle scales Vera Rubin to multi-gigawatt, and Zipline raises one and a half billion dollars.
Nvidia H200 chips pile up in Hong Kong
- ~600,000 H200 chips stored awaiting shipment to mainland China as Beijing withholds large-scale import approval (Reuters, Nov 5)
- 8-card H200 server >6M yuan (~$900k) in mainland China, ~3x a year ago
- Blackwell servers >20M yuan
- follows Nov 4 news of Alibaba/Tencent/ByteDance ordering ~6M Nvidia RTX Pro 5500 cards
Qualcomm fiscal Q4 2026 (Nov 4)
- revenue $10.44B down 7% YoY, adjusted EPS $2.17 down 28%
- handset chips down 26% to $5.14B
- global smartphone shipments down 20% in Sept quarter (14-year low) on memory costs
- automotive record $1.99B up 89% (first $2B quarter)
- IoT $1.89B up 4%
- data-center revenue expected >$650M in Q1 FY27, $5B FY27 target, $15B by FY29
- Amazon warrant deal up to $60B chips
- handsets to be <50% of chip revenue in FY27
- shares down 7%+ after hours
Oracle AI World 2026 (Nov 5)
- Nvidia and Oracle expand Vera Rubin NVL72 systems on OCI to multi-gigawatt scale
- Vera CPUs now available on OCI
- Rubin HGX NVL8 planned
- OpenAI trained/served GPT-6 Astra on OCI Abilene supercluster with 100,000+ Blackwell GPUs
OpenAI acquires Pierre Computer Company (Axios)
- developer-tools startup whose code navigation powers parts of Codex
- pairs with Pando Git backend
- OpenAI challenging GitHub in AI coding
OpenAI autonomous security pipeline vs Linux kernel
- found 2,308 potential flaws, reproduced 1,724, including 948 distinct ways to gain root access
- experiment cost ~$1.2M
Salesforce agrees to acquire Cresta (Nov 2)
- voice AI platform (voice agents, live rep coaching, conversation analytics)
- customers Marriott, Comcast, Alaska Airlines
- price undisclosed, The Information reports $2.7B
- close expected Q1 fiscal 2028 (Feb–Apr 2027)
- Salesforce's 10th acquisition agreement of 2026
Tencent releases Hy4 (Nov 4)
- 770B-parameter open-source model, first Hunyuan model to understand images and directly operate computers
- activates only 49B parameters per query
- same week Moonshot released Kimi K3.1 Pro weights, largest publicly downloadable open-weight model
Funding
- Zipline $1.5B at $21.5B valuation (Paradigm, WCM, Layer Global
- Uber, Tiger Global, JPMorgan), nearly 3x in ~10 months, drone delivery across 4 continents
- Ocient $100M Series C (agentic AI analytics, petabyte-scale data)
- Kalepa $75M Series B at $470M valuation (AI insurance, Updata Partners)
- Traversal $120M at $1B valuation (AI agents for site reliability engineering, Kleiner Perkins)
Rapid-fire
- Meta acquires AI coding startup Conductor
- Apple reportedly cutting internal AI tool budgets for engineers
- Anthropic used Claude to help determine first 3D structure of a vault particle in bacteria (Science)
- Google Gemini uses saved personal chat history for model training with no opt-out short of disabling history
- Sequoia raises ~$10B in new funds while closing London office