Musk's Republican allies lose Congress; AMD's chip demand lifts shares

Marcus here.

Today’s AI bets come with bills worth a closer look.

Elon Musk put $445.6 million into Republican causes through Oct. 14 and greeted this morning’s election results with a joke about space lasers on X early Wednesday. He also posted about data centers.

AMD forecast about $17 billion in fourth-quarter revenue on Tuesday, above the $16.2 billion analyst average, after three days of share declines over AI spending fears.

Revolut now makes self-hosted models the default for roughly 2,000 engineers. Its infrastructure lead says there is no bill shock at the end of the month.

Stay curious,

Marcus Schuler

Elon Musk joked about Republican losses after Democrats won the House and Senate, having put $445.6 million into Republican causes through Oct. 14.

“Guess my election-interfering space lasers didn't work this time,” Musk posted early Wednesday. Another post read: “Data centers in space looking pretty appealing right now.”

Gina Hinojosa beat Texas Gov. Greg Abbott after pledging a data center moratorium. Abbott had already frozen state environmental permits on Sept. 21. Wells Fargo estimates Texas holds 27% of planned U.S. data center capacity.

Why This Matters:

• SemiAnalysis calculates Texas developers could face about eight months frozen from September through the legislative session, nearly a year if reopening awaits new rules.
• Democratic leaders have signaled investigations of top Trump administration officials, with Musk among the possible targets after the party won both chambers.

AMD forecast about $17 billion in fourth-quarter revenue on Nov. 3, above the $16.2 billion analyst average.

Third-quarter revenue rose 45% from a year earlier to $13.4 billion. Data center revenue reached $8.5 billion, or 64% of the total, versus 47% a year earlier. Shares rose 8% in extended trading on Nov. 3, following three days of declines amid fears about overspending on AI.

The Financial Times tests Nscale's planned $35 billion IPO against the financing and construction risks of one West Virginia data center project.

Anthropic's roughly $45 billion lease for the first building represents more than 40% of Nscale's $103 billion revenue backlog. When it ran on Oct. 30, Nscale had yet to secure construction or equipment funding, and Anthropic could leave if financing missed a set deadline.

• Canva CEO Melanie Perkins told staff its restructuring affects 1,271 people, or 22% of the workforce, though the company would not confirm how many would lose their jobs.
• Google banned Videostrong from certified Android devices after saying the manufacturer built a backdoor that enrolled more than 1.3 million set-top boxes in a botnet.
• OpenAI hired former Army Secretary Dan Driscoll as senior counselor for national security modernization, a new role.
• Fal raised $1.3 billion at a $16 billion valuation, double its April valuation, in a Bessemer-led round with Nvidia participating.
• Apple opened Siri AI to all developers through a Developer Preview in iOS 27.3 betas released Nov. 3.
• OpenAI says ChatGPT reached 1.2 billion weekly active users, up from 1 billion 60 days earlier.

Compare vendor prices on one page.

Vendor proposals often hide price differences inside usage units, support tiers, and contract terms. Ask an LLM to normalize the offers before the next negotiation.

Your raw input:

The prompt:

Why this works:

The fixed comparison fields stop the model from echoing each sales document in its own preferred framing. Requiring calculations and unknown labels makes hidden assumptions visible before anyone chooses a winner.

What to use:

Use a reasoning model that handles tables and arithmetic reliably.

Daytona sells isolated cloud computers that let AI agents run code, browse and retain working state without touching a customer's production systems. Its case rests on breadth: one service offers Linux, Windows, macOS and GPU sandboxes while customers such as Writer and AfterQuery have replaced internal execution infrastructure with it.

Founders:

Ivan Burazin, Vedran Jukić and Goran Draganić founded Daytona in 2023 after building Codeanywhere together. Burazin also served as chief developer experience officer at Infobip; Jukić is Daytona's CTO and Draganić its chief architect.

Product:

Developers call Daytona through software kits to create disposable computers for coding agents and other programs that execute untrusted code. Customers pay for processor, memory and storage use. Daytona says Writer provisioned 300,000 sandboxes in one month after its internal system passed 20,000 a day; its customer list also names Meta, Cohere, Clay, n8n and Postman.

Financing:

Daytona has raised $91 million through October 20, 2026. A $60 million Series B announced that day was led by FirstMark Growth and valued the company at $1 billion. Daytona said revenue grew about 25 times from January through October 20, 2026, but did not disclose the revenue base.

The risk:

E2B, Modal and cloud platforms sell competing execution environments. Daytona must prove that its wider hardware menu outweighs a security question: its default container sandboxes share a host kernel, while stronger virtual-machine isolation requires a separate class.

On Tuesday, Nov. 3, Binance said North Korean hackers carried out last Thursday's $6.3 billion heist after luring an engineer into fake job interviews. It was the biggest theft in crypto history.

Our take: The biggest crypto heist ever included a job interview at a company that did not exist. Binance forbids LinkedIn profiles for staff in non-public-facing roles, so its public explanation came with an unanswered question about whether the engineer had broken a company rule. That is a remarkably small question to leave hanging over $6.3 billion.

Binance said it stopped 57 North Korea-related hacking attempts in 2026. That would have made a fine line in a security presentation before last Thursday. Once the hackers got in, Binance's own AI tool helped them gain control over other engineers.

Marcus Schuler

San Francisco

Editor-in-Chief and founder of Implicator.ai. Former ARD correspondent and senior broadcast journalist with 10+ years covering tech. Writes daily briefings on policy and market developments. Based in San Francisco. E-mail: editor@implicator.ai