Tech Express | November 07, 2026 OpenAI Raises $11 Billion at a $1.25 Trillion Valuation, Below Earlier Target

1. OpenAI Raises $11 Billion in New Round at a $1.25 Trillion Valuation

Source: TechCrunch

OpenAI has reportedly raised $11 billion so far in a new funding round that values the AI lab at $1.25 trillion. The money is part of a larger round that has not closed yet; a source told Bloomberg the round is expected to close in the coming weeks and could total about $20 billion.

The figures fall well short of earlier plans. In late September, Bloomberg reported that OpenAI was looking to raise $30 billion in the upcoming round. The company had previously intimated it would go public this year but later delayed those plans, and there are expectations it will hold an IPO sometime next year.

The news came only hours after Bloomberg reported that potential buyers of shares in the IPO of OpenAI's chief competitor, Anthropic, are eyeing a substantially lower valuation — some as low as $1.1 trillion, compared with the $2 trillion investors were said to expect roughly a month ago. TechCrunch notes that the Democratic landslide in the U.S. midterms, and overwhelmingly negative voter sentiment around data centers, have caused jitters across the AI market, with many anticipating regulatory challenges ahead.

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2. AP: After the Midterms, US AI Data Centers Face Stricter Oversight

Source: Guancha

AI data centers took a heavy hit in the U.S. midterm elections and tech giants may now be heading for a reckoning, with a tougher regulatory environment likely ahead, the Associated Press reported on November 7. Data center regulation itself was not on most ballots, nor was it the top issue for most voters.

But hard-line positions on data centers made it into many candidates' platforms, including Democrats who ended decades of Republican control of governorships in Texas, Ohio, Georgia, Nevada and Iowa — several of them states where data centers cluster. AdImpact data shows campaigns spent more than $380 million on television ads mentioning data centers, with Democratic spending more than triple that of Republicans.

Data Center Watch tracked winners in congressional and gubernatorial races and found the vast majority backed stricter regulation or even moratoriums. At the governor level, 32 of the 34 races AP has called were won by candidates supporting tighter rules or limits, 12 of whom backed bans or moratoriums. Morgan Stanley said in a note this could divide the country into places that welcome new data centers and places that do not. The Nasdaq closed Thursday 11% below its record high.

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3. ZDNET Tests HP's $7,000 OmniBook Ultra: One Day of Local AI Builds a 20-Year Article Index

Source: ZDNET

ZDNET tested HP's $7,000 OmniBook Ultra: an Nvidia RTX Spark platform with 128GB of unified memory, 2TB of Gen5 NVMe storage, a 16-inch OLED display, a weight of nearly five pounds and 1 petaflop of FP4 AI performance. The reviewer describes it less as a portable PC than as a personal data center.

Using the open-source llama.cpp inference runtime, the open-weights Qwen3.8-27B model and the Cline extension in Visual Studio Code, he turned 20 years of his own ZDNET articles into a searchable archive locally, finishing in a single day. The fan was audible throughout, but the machine never got uncomfortably hot.

The result was two folders of 1,951 files each, one in raw HTML and one in Markdown. When roughly 90 links returned 404 errors, the model wrote its own routine to pull those pages from the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, and another 90 or so pages could not be retrieved at all, which took about 30 minutes to sort out. The project used 479 LLM inference calls and nearly 50 million logical tokens, at a total net cost of exactly $0.00, with no data leaving the PC.

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4. AMD Q3 Data Center Revenue Reaches $8.55 Billion, Up 97%, as Gaming Falls 40%

Source: Mydrivers

AMD chair and CEO Lisa Su said in a November 5 interview that AMD is a data-center-first company, with the growth of various applications driving more demand for computing power, according to Mydrivers' report on November 7.

The company's third-quarter results show data center revenue reached $8.546 billion, up 97% year over year and about 64% of total revenue, compared with roughly 47% a year earlier; EPYC server processors and Instinct accelerators drove the growth. Gaming revenue was $773 million, down 40% year over year and now less than 6% of the total, which AMD attributed to lower semi-custom chip and graphics card revenue. Semi-custom chips include the ones AMD supplies for Sony and Microsoft game consoles.

Su expects data center revenue to grow 50% sequentially in the fourth quarter and said she hopes to more than double that business next year. Asked about concerns over AI spending, she said observers sometimes take too short a view, and that AMD typically plans investments and products three to five years ahead.

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5. Sony Locks In GDDR7 Supply a Year Early to Stock PS6 and Steady Pricing

Source: Mydrivers

Sony disclosed the development status of its next-generation PlayStation 6 console in its latest earnings report, confirming the hardware is progressing strictly on schedule and that the basic architecture design for the chip and related components has been completed, Mydrivers reported on November 7.

Sony has also locked in GDDR7 memory supply for 2027 and 2028 in advance. Executives stressed at the earnings meeting that, to ensure financial stability and keep future retail prices in check, the company reached a preliminary agreement with suppliers to book all the memory capacity it needs for the fiscal year from April 2027 to March 2028, using a long-term fixed-price contract to avoid cyclical semiconductor price swings and wafer shortages.

The report says Sony is heeding the lesson of the PS5 launch, when global supply chain disruption left the console hard to find for a long stretch and rivals ate into its market share. By securing core components more than a year ahead, Sony aims for a large-scale rollout in the 2027 holiday season. The PS6 launch window is most likely the fourth quarter of 2027, which would put the PS5 lifecycle at about seven years, in line with previous generations.

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6. Xiaomi 18 Standard Passes 3C Certification With 100W Charging and Dual 200MP Cameras

Source: Mydrivers

A Xiaomi phone with the model number M261DB has passed China's MIIT 3C certification with 100W wired charging, Mydrivers reported on November 7. The tipster "Experience More" says the device is the Xiaomi 18 standard edition, and multiple leaks point to a December launch with a dedicated press event.

According to earlier leaks from "Digital Chat Station", the Xiaomi 18 lineup will all use 2nm flagship chips, next-generation flagship displays, dual 200MP cameras and large batteries. The standard model is expected to run Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8E6, described as the only standard-edition flagship this year built on a 2nm chip.

The standard model drops the Pro's rear secondary display and keeps a square camera matrix. Imaging is the biggest upgrade: a dual 200MP setup with a periscope telephoto for the first time, combining a 200MP 1/1.28-inch main sensor, a 50MP ultrawide and a 200MP 3x optical periscope. The front is expected to be a 6.4-inch 1.5K flat display using M11 emitter material with no privacy filter. Engineering units carried a 7,200mAh battery with 100W wired and wireless charging, and later leaks mention an 8,000mAh cell, though that is unconfirmed.

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7. Google Confirms a Detachable-Screen Googlebook Is on the Roadmap

Source: Mydrivers

Google confirmed at its 2026 Android Developers Conference that Googlebook hardware will expand from today's clamshell and convertible designs to a detachable-screen form factor, bringing a Surface-style two-in-one design to the platform and filling a gap in portable tablets, Mydrivers reported on November 7.

In the keynote, Google said its hardware roadmap will soon cover the detachable category. The report notes that Googlebook is more than a renamed OS: it aims to fuse the Android app ecosystem with ChromeOS productivity features and natively integrates the Gemini agentic AI tools. Compared with the first clamshell models starting at $899, the detachable design offers more flexibility for mobile work.

Software adaptation remains the bottleneck. On existing Googlebook devices, the home screen, task view and app drawer are still locked to landscape and cannot rotate to portrait, which is seen as a major obstacle to challenging Apple's iPad Pro or high-end Android tablets. Lenovo is seen as the first contender for the new form factor; a device with the internal codename Sapphire, rumored to be called the Googlebook Duet m, has appeared in certification filings, expected with a 13-inch OLED screen, an integrated kickstand and detachable keyboard, stylus support, two USB-C ports and Google's signature Glowbar light around the camera.

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8. Shenzhou-24 to Carry a Pakistani Payload Specialist, the First Foreign Astronaut on China's Space Station

Source: Guancha

One Pakistani astronaut will fly on the Shenzhou-24 crewed mission as a payload specialist and return aboard the Shenzhou-23 spacecraft after a short stay in orbit, China's manned space program said on November 7 via its WeChat account. It marks the first joint flight by Chinese and foreign astronauts in the history of China's crewed space program, and the first foreign astronaut to visit China's space station.

In February 2025, China and Pakistan signed an agreement in Islamabad on selecting and training Pakistani astronauts and taking part in a flight mission to China's space station, formally launching the selection process.

After a rigorous three-stage process of preliminary, secondary and final selection, two Pakistani candidate astronauts were chosen. Both completed training in China and passed assessments; one will fly the mission and the other will serve as backup.

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9. Huawei's Qingyun HM650 Wins China's First 100% Domestic-Content Certification

Source: Mydrivers

Huawei this week launched what it calls the industry's first desktop PC built entirely from domestically developed components, Mydrivers reported on November 7. At the Huawei Qingyun 2026 HarmonyOS office industry summit, Zhu Dongdong, president of Huawei's tablet and PC product line, announced that the first HarmonyOS desktop in the Qingyun HM650 series had obtained the industry's first official certification for 100% domestic content.

Zhu said Huawei reached full domestic substitution of core components through a three-step strategy: in-house development of core parts, joint development of key parts with upstream and downstream partners, and targeted support to expand production of general-purpose parts. He credited years of joint investment and coordination by thousands of companies across China's PC supply chain.

The desktop uses a fully domestic Kirin chip and runs Huawei's self-developed HarmonyOS, with neither core hardware nor the underlying system dependent on controlled overseas technology. The report says the machine offers a mature foundation for the security needs of government and enterprise offices, and for the broader adoption of domestic consumer PCs.

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10. ByteDance Reportedly Weighs Expanding Its Brazil Data Center Investment

Source: Lianhe Zaobao

ByteDance is considering expanding its data center project in northeastern Brazil, with the proposed build-out potentially larger than the $10 billion project currently under construction there, according to Bloomberg. The move would further entrench the company in Latin America's computing infrastructure.

People familiar with the matter told Bloomberg that ByteDance is looking for a developer to oversee the second phase of the data center project in the Pecem industrial park in Ceara state. Its current project has 300 megawatts of capacity and an investment of about $10 billion, and the proposed second phase would be larger.

ByteDance is also in early talks with developers about building another data center of similar scale outside the Pecem park to serve local Brazilian customers. Under local policy, data centers inside the park must be used for data exports to qualify for tax incentives.

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