Tech News · The field notes
Personal Tech — Friday, November 6, 2026
AI stocks tumble in a brutal Thursday selloff, OpenAI drops data-center NDAs after the midterms, chip packaging becomes the new battleground, and Sand.ai raises two hundred million dollars.
AI stock selloff Nov 5
- Nasdaq -5.52%, S&P 500 -4.36%, Nvidia -9.3%, AMD -17%+, Philadelphia Semiconductor Index -12%+
- Big Tech capex $720B+ this year
- Alphabet negative FCF $9.1B in Q3, capex $51.4B, second straight quarter in the red
OpenAI drops NDAs with public officials on data-center projects (The Verge, Nov 6)
- will pay full cost of electricity and infrastructure
- narrow protections only
- follows Nov 3 midterm data-center backlash
Chip packaging battleground (Reuters, Nov 6)
- advanced packaging revenue to overtake traditional packaging in 2026
- capex ~$28B
- TSMC dominates CoWoS
- Nvidia financing SPIL capacity expansion
- packaging could be half of chip value (Gelsinger)
Cat Wu, Claude Code product leader, joins OpenAI to lead Core Products product management (Nov 5)
- follows OpenAI's planned acquisition of Pierre Computer Company for Codex Git workflows
DeepSeek Harness
- ~1.54M daily active users, ~92 trillion tokens/day, ~35,000 third-party plugins (company-reported)
Funding
- Sand.ai $200M Series A+ (generative video, ~$300M total in 2026)
- Sentra $150M Series C led by Capital One Ventures (data security vs AI agents)
- Fal $1.3B Series F at $16B valuation (Bessemer, Nvidia)
- Humble Robotics $51M Series A (Obvious Ventures)
Rapid-fire
- DOJ indictment alleges AI-enabled impersonation stole $129M
- SpaceX + Qualcomm Dragonwing terrestrial 5G for Starlink Mobile (from 2027, tens of thousands of sites)
- Google licenses custom AI chips to Oracle
- OpenAI releases Images 2.6 with GIF animation