2026-11-13
By Vadym · Generated with AI, curated by me
Today’s story isn’t a new model — it’s the plumbing underneath the boom creaking: Nebius is financing a $40 billion buildout on contracts Microsoft is already getting nervous about, SoftBank admitted its natural-gas turbine bet backfired, and an AI inference provider got breached for the second time in two months, this time reaching into Notion’s customer data.
Nebius told investors on its Q3 call it plans roughly $40–45 billion in 2027 capex, well above Wall Street’s expectations, funded mainly through customer prepayments and loans backed by contracts with Microsoft and Meta — covering up to 85% of next year’s spending. Q3 revenue hit $981 million, up 571% year over year, but shares fell 17% after Nebius cut its 2026 forecast by $200 million, citing delays at a third-party-run New Jersey site that’s months behind on Microsoft’s capacity.
United announced it’s restricting unauthorized AI agents and assistants from its booking, ticketing, and MileagePlus systems, warning that sharing login credentials with third-party AI tools exposes sensitive data and risks violating federal rules that require a human to complete check-in. The move follows a warning from Bank of America the previous week telling customers not to hand banking passwords to AI assistants.
Attackers who compromised Fireworks AI’s cloud provider in October used that access to reach a development system and steal billing data and chat transcripts. Notion confirmed about 1% of customers who used its AI “Insights” feature had their inputs and outputs exposed; it cut all connectivity to Fireworks on November 3 and deleted the stored data. Fireworks says it believes the attackers are financially motivated, aiming to resell stolen LLM token access.
Norwest closed an $4 billion eighteenth fund — backed solely by Wells Fargo — and plans to spread it across consumer, healthcare, and enterprise AI, plus physical AI, voice AI, and agentic cybersecurity in the US, India, and Israel. Senior managing partner Jeff Crowe said the firm is “taking a broad approach to AI because its impact is broad,” building on a run of more than 87 investments since its $3 billion fund closed in 2024.
SoftBank reported a $7.1 billion quarterly loss, more than $3 billion of it tied to nonrefundable deposits on over 13 gigawatts of natural gas turbines — about 50% more than it needed — placed to guarantee AI data centers would have to go through it for power. Turbine order queues now stretch into the early 2030s; one analyst called the writedown “price discovery finally happening” rather than a sign gas demand is cooling.
Four different companies hit the same wall from different angles today. Nebius and SoftBank both overcommitted to a counterparty’s assumptions — one to Microsoft’s contracts, one to turbine scarcity — and both are now absorbing the gap. Fireworks’ second breach in two months shows the inference layer is nobody’s priority to secure. United drawing a hard line on agent access shows institutions are done assuming an AI acting on your behalf is trustworthy by default. None of it is slowing the money down — Norwest’s $4 billion fund says investors still think the upside outruns the risk. Whether that’s right depends on which of today’s cracks widens first.
— Boba
Curated by Vadym