2026-11-12
By Vadym · Generated with AI, curated by me
No major model dropped today — the AI industry’s plumbing wobbled instead: Nvidia’s board is reportedly weighing whether to remove Jensen Huang, CoreWeave leaned on customer prepayments to keep funding its buildout, and Meta quietly swapped out its longtime infrastructure chief, all while new chips and research kept shipping underneath the turbulence.
The Wall Street Journal reported Nvidia’s board is preparing to decide whether to remove co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang, who has run the company for 33 years, with a board meeting possible as soon as this week. Shares fell about 8% after hours and are down roughly 11% over five trading days; Bloomberg reports Nvidia is already working with an outside firm to screen successor candidates. Huang reportedly delegates very little and has about 60 direct reports, and the company has no formal succession plan.
CoreWeave posted Q3 revenue of $3.66 billion, up 168% year over year, but a $709 million net loss and $846 million in quarterly interest expense pushed it to rework how it pays for growth. The company expects about $9 billion in customer prepayments and deposits over the next three months and is selling more short-term capacity at premium prices — sometimes double the rate of multi-year contracts — rather than tapping unsecured debt that recently priced above 15%.
Databricks shipped an updated version of Genie, its AI agent, built on an internal ontology that gives it context across a company’s own data, and is pitching it as an always-on agent for business leaders rather than just analysts. CEO Ali Ghodsi demoed it on his own real work: it flagged where an employee survey scored worst, talked him out of executives’ proposed fixes, and summarized a lost sales pitch along with what the prospect actually wanted before buying.
UK chip startup Fractile closed a $720 million Series C led by Thrive Capital, Founders Fund, Lightspeed, and Redpoint, with backing from Britain’s Sovereign AI Fund, at a valuation the UK government put above £5 billion (reportedly near $7 billion). Its design stacks DRAM directly on each chip to get around the usual trade-off between memory capacity and speed, aiming at long-running agentic workloads; first chips and systems are planned for next year.
Santosh Janardhan, Meta’s head of infrastructure and co-head of engineering since 2009, is handing off the role, according to an internal memo reported by Bloomberg that cited the need to “pass the baton.” He’ll move into an advisory role on Meta Compute, the company’s data-center scaling initiative, through a transition expected to end in 2027; his successor is Dave Brown, who joined Meta this year after 19 years running compute and cloud infrastructure at Amazon.
Google DeepMind released AlphaGenome 2, which predicts how a DNA sequence and its variants affect gene activity in a specific cell type rather than averaging across a whole tissue, trained on more than 100 million single-cell profiles across 68 tissues. On a benchmark immune-cell dataset it identified roughly twice as many disease-causing variants as the original model (30% versus 16%), and it’s available now for non-commercial research through DeepMind’s API.
Three companies, three flavors of the same strain. Nvidia’s governance crisis shows what happens when one irreplaceable person sits atop a trillion-dollar supply chain with no succession plan. CoreWeave’s financing pivot shows the AI buildout’s debt math getting less forgiving even with 168% revenue growth. Meta quietly swapping infrastructure chiefs mid-buildout shows how much turnover the industry can absorb without missing a beat. Underneath all of it, the actual technology kept moving — Fractile’s memory-stacked chips and DeepMind’s cell-level genome model are the kind of unglamorous progress that doesn’t need a board meeting to happen.
— Boba
Curated by Vadym