Putin orders Russian data centers to reserve 10% for the state, Traversal raises $120 million, and more - Daily AI Brief #574

In this edition, covering 2 and 3 November:

• Vladimir Putin signed a decree requiring privately owned data centers in Russia to reserve 10% of their capacity for government use at 24 hours' notice.
• Traversal raised $120 million in a Series B at a $1 billion valuation for its AI SRE platform.
• A South Korean smuggler reportedly moves Samsung and SK hynix HBM into China by packaging it with low performance processors that pass export checks.
• AMD reported record third quarter revenue of $13.4 billion, and OpenAI says ChatGPT handles search queries at about one fifth of Google's volume.

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Deals and funding

New York based Traversal raised $120 million in a Series B at a $1 billion valuation, co led by Kleiner Perkins, Redpoint Ventures and Khosla Ventures, for its AI SRE platform. Syncere raised $11 million in pre seed funding led by a16z Speedrun to deliver its $2,699 Lume robot lamp, which can fold laundry, tidy rooms and make beds. Traversal · Syncere

London based Tallia, formerly Revax, raised €4 million in seed funding co led by Outward VC and the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales for its tax research and drafting platform. Clark says its $11 million seed round will go to expanding its product, senior team and audit services for CPA firms, including government work. Tallia · Clark

Applied Compute raised $350 million at a $3.25 billion valuation in a round led by Elad Gil and says its annualized revenue run rate reached $100 million in under 18 months. Egyptian venture fund Nclude closed more than $112 million to back fintech and AI startups across Africa and the Middle East. Applied Compute · Nclude

Denmark's $25 billion AkademikerPension plans to buy Anthropic shares in its IPO, citing the company's governance and safety commitments. Anthropic reported an 85.4% gross margin on $16.3 billion in first half 2026 revenue, and HSBC analysts found it earned $2.08 per $1 of compute, against $0.46 for Z.ai. AkademikerPension · Anthropic margin

Chord bought Zenlytic, doubling its revenue and adding customers such as Verizon, J.Crew and Domino's. Fractal passed $100 million in quarterly revenue, up 20% from a year earlier, as net income rose 139%. Chord · Fractal

e2e, based in San Francisco and Warsaw, raised €7 million in seed funding led by Credo Ventures to build an open source AI testing framework. e2e

Ada, the Toronto customer service AI company, will merge with Dialpad in an all share deal valuing Ada at about $600 million. Crediflow AI in Manchester raised €1.8 million to automate commercial loan processing. Ada and Dialpad · Crediflow AI

Supa raised £21 million to buy UK block management firms and run them with AI; it manages about 20,000 homes. Israeli startup Explorium is shutting down after raising more than $127 million. Supa · Explorium

Nums AI, a South Korean tabular data startup, raised $1.5 million, bringing its total to $4.6 million. Singapore law firm WongPartnership chose August to build custom AI agents for its lawyers. Nums AI · WongPartnership

Capital One Ventures led a $150 million investment in Sentra, an agentic data security company. Sentra

Battery Ventures led a $5 million seed round in Shackleton AI, which builds AI agents for construction project paperwork. Shackleton AI

Berlin fintech Pliant raised an $80 million Series C to build payment infrastructure for AI agents and expand in North America. General Catalyst committed $500 million to sales automation startup Nooks in exchange for a share of returns, not equity. Pliant · Nooks

Infrastructure and chips

AMD reported record third quarter revenue of $13.4 billion, up 45%, as Data Center revenue nearly doubled to $8.5 billion, and expects about $17 billion in the fourth quarter. AMD

A South Korean smuggler reportedly moves Samsung and SK hynix HBM through Hong Kong into Shenzhen, packaged with low performance processors that pass export checks, where technicians remove the memory for AI systems. Fermi says its 222MW lease with AMD based neocloud TensorWave did not close by the 31 October deadline, and both companies are still working toward closing. HBM smuggling · Fermi and TensorWave

Schwarz Digits and Bull signed a preliminary agreement on AI computing services under European jurisdiction, offered through STACKIT, with Bull making the servers and software. A Bitkom study by the Borderstep Institute forecasts German data center investment will rise 57% to €23.5 billion in 2026, driven by cloud services and AI. California Resources Corporation and Bloom Energy signed a non binding agreement to evaluate at least 1GW of fuel cell projects in Central and Northern California for data centers, utilities and industrial users. Schwarz Digits and Bull · Bitkom · Bloom Energy

Arista Networks reported third quarter revenue of $3.66 billion, up 58.5%, and expects $3.9 billion to $4.0 billion in the fourth quarter. Super Micro Computer reported unaudited fiscal first quarter net sales of $19.9 billion and expects fiscal 2027 sales of $72 billion to $82 billion. Arista · Supermicro

Analog Devices completed its acquisition of Alif Semiconductor, adding AI native microcontrollers and fusion processors to its portfolio. Analog Devices

Latrobe Council staff approved Firmus's plan to convert a warehouse at the former Wesley Vale pulp mill in Tasmania into a 26 megawatt AI research and development facility. Firmus

Hut 8 lifted the expected contract value of its Beacon Point data center campus to $19.6 billion and agreed to buy two more Texas sites. Hut 8

Goodman Group and Digital Realty offered AU$715 million for 9.9% of NextDC, a 45.5% premium. Aker's CEO called Microsoft's cancelled Nscale deal a minor contract as Nscale plans a US listing. Camtek reported record quarterly revenue of $161.3 million, up 28%. NextDC · Nscale · Camtek

Oracle reportedly ended a $7 billion deal to lease about 100,000 AI chips to Tencent after concerns from US officials. Google plans to invest $15 billion in Malaysian data centers in 2027 and 2028. Oracle and Tencent · Google Malaysia

Policy

AI stocks fell overnight after Democrat Gina Hinojosa was projected to win the Texas governor race; she supports a moratorium on AI data centers in the state. Texas

Vladimir Putin signed a decree requiring privately owned data centers in Russia to reserve 10% of their capacity for government use at 24 hours' notice, and allowing temporary use of data centers abroad with FSB approval. Russian decree

At the World Internet Conference Wuzhen Summit, Chinese Premier Li Qiang called for AI to remain under human control and warned against a digital divide. Alibaba chairman Joe Tsai told the same summit that open source AI is needed to expand access and support a sustainable industry. Li Qiang · Joe Tsai

The European Council will hold an informal meeting of EU leaders on AI in Dublin on 13 November, hosted by Taoiseach Micheál Martin, with Arthur Mensch and Geoffrey Hinton attending. Dublin meeting

The Foundation for American Innovation filed an amicus brief supporting OpenAI in its copyright litigation, arguing that courts should weigh the national security and public benefits of AI training in fair use. OpenAI copyright case

Malaysia will use its communications and cyber safety laws against an alleged foreign AI influence campaign aimed at voters, and has asked Anthropic for technical evidence. Malaysia

UK MPs and peers urged Amazon and eBay to remove toys with built in AI chatbots and asked for a ban on sales to under 16s. Canada's Chief Electoral Officer asked for legal labels on synthetic election content and for chatbots to link to official sources. AI toys · Elections Canada

AWS launched Semarak AI Malaysia, with AI coding tools for up to 4,000 government developers by 2028. Geoffrey Hinton warned that an AI failure on the scale of a major outage could happen this year or next. AWS Malaysia · Hinton

Portugal is drafting rules that would require data centers to run on renewable power and use cooling that does not strain local water. Portugal

Voters approved about two dozen measures restricting or blocking data center construction across 10 states, according to initial returns. Data center votes

Education and research

Google will pilot Guided Learning in Search at selected US schools later in November and is making it available globally in Classroom, with Gemini and Search off by default for kindergarten to grade 12 student accounts. Cashmere launched Meridian with Cambridge University Press, Johns Hopkins University Press and Princeton University Press, giving authorized students and researchers AI tool access to licensed books and journals that cannot be used for training. Guided Learning · Meridian

A working paper from MIT Sloan and MIT FutureTech finds that 32% of the world's 100 largest companies and 62% of the 1,000 largest have not publicly acknowledged any AI risks. Artificial Analysis launched Intelligence Index v5, with 60% of evaluations on private or held out test sets, and Claude Opus 5.5 leads ahead of GPT-6 Astra and GPT-6.1 Sol. AI risk disclosures · Intelligence Index v5

A HEC Paris study of 13,241 high growth software startups from 2019 to 2024 found that those adopting AI chatbots grew employment 4.3% more than similar non adopters, most strongly in sales. HEC Paris

Apple's 2026 Form 10-K says AI agents could act without authorization, access restricted systems and expose data, creating legal, security and privacy risks. Irregular CEO Dan Lahav said human error and a misconfigured test environment let models from Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta and Google reach the internet during cybersecurity evaluations. Apple · Irregular

AI2 released StateBench, which tests how models track changing facts across long documents; recurrent and hybrid models beat transformers on the longer tasks. StateBench

A CNAS report warns that AI agents able to change their goals, copy themselves and resist shutdown could become impossible to control. Rocky Linux creator Gregory Kurtzer built Ginux, a Rust kernel of about 139,000 lines, with OpenAI Codex in 11 days. CNAS · Ginux

An RMIT University survey of 7,200 adults in the US, UK and Australia found 7% had faced non-consensual AI generated intimate images. RMIT

Xpeng open sourced GroundingPI, a 4 billion parameter robot perception model it says beats GPT-6 Astra on 34 public benchmarks. Xpeng

Also

OpenAI consumer product lead Adam Fry says ChatGPT handles search like queries at about one fifth of Google's volume and has 1.2 billion weekly active users. ChatGPT search

OpenAI raised its Security Bug Bounty rewards to up to $30,000 for critical vulnerabilities in core products and up to $172,000 for exceptional findings with bonuses, also for eligible recent and pending reports. HUMAIN, a Public Investment Fund portfolio company in Saudi Arabia, is integrating CNTXT to add cloud transformation, data, AI, cybersecurity and managed technology services. Thomson Reuters reported third quarter revenue of $1.833 billion, up 10%, and updated its full year outlook after selling a 51% stake in its Global Print business. OpenAI bug bounty · HUMAIN · Thomson Reuters

OpenAI hired Uber's Jill Hazelbaker as chief corporate affairs officer, reporting to President Greg Brockman. OpenAI is expanding its work with Chip Ganassi Racing on turning 3D scans into CAD models and started a research collaboration with Mazda on aerodynamics and crash safety. Jill Hazelbaker · Chip Ganassi Racing

Palantir reported third quarter revenue of $2.313 billion, up 96%, as US commercial revenue rose 148% to $984 million and passed US government revenue for the first time. Palantir

Docker released Docker Sandboxes 0.51.0 on 3 November, fixing CVE-2026-103916, which let AI agents use symbolic links to reach files outside approved sandbox folders. Amazon revised its internal software engineering guidance to put customer and business outcomes ahead of code volume or AI usage measures. Docker · Amazon

Cat Wu, who led product for Claude Code, has left Anthropic. Disney is testing AI storyboards for lyric videos with OpenArt, starting with "Go the Distance" from Hercules. Microsoft says North Korean hacking groups widely use AI to speed up their attacks. Cat Wu · Disney · North Korea

Mandiant says attackers steal cloud credentials and LLM API keys, running up more than $100,000 in charges a day and up to $1 million at some companies. LLMJacking

Sam Altman says India has passed the US as OpenAI's largest market by users. Replit opened its first Asian office, in Tokyo. GPTZero found 31 hallucinated citations in three Accenture publications. India · Replit · Accenture