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This Week's Tech Stories That Actually Matter

OpenAI's ChatGPT Atlas: Your Browser Just Became Sentient

OpenAI dropped ChatGPT Atlas on October 21—a full web browser with ChatGPT baked into every pixel, rolling out first on macOS.

Every webpage gets an "Ask ChatGPT" button. Agent mode books flights, orders groceries, handles multi-step workflows while you watch Netflix. With 800 million weekly users, Atlas is the first legitimate threat to Google's browser monopoly in over a decade.

Google should be very, very nervous right now.

AWS Outage Took Down Half the Internet

AWS suffered a major outage this week from a configuration error during routine maintenance. Streaming platforms, e-commerce sites, enterprise SaaS tools—all down for hours.

The irony? Anthropic's multi-cloud strategy kept Claude online throughout. Don't put all your eggs in one cloud basket. Even if that basket is owned by Amazon.

OpenAI's ChatGPT Atlas: Your Browser Just Became Sentient

OpenAI dropped ChatGPT Atlas on October 21—a full web browser with ChatGPT baked into every pixel, rolling out first on macOS.

Every webpage gets an "Ask ChatGPT" button. Agent mode books flights, orders groceries, handles multi-step workflows while you watch Netflix. With 800 million weekly users, Atlas is the first legitimate threat to Google's browser monopoly in over a decade.

Google should be very, very nervous right now.

AI Megarounds Hit Record Highs: 70% of U.S. VC Goes to $100M+ Deals

The funding game just got brutally exclusive.

Crunchbase confirmed it: 70% of all U.S. venture capital in 2025 went into rounds of $100 million or more. Over two-thirds of that money? Straight to AI companies.

This week's receipts:

• Sesame raised $250M Series B for AI smart glasses with always-on assistants

• Fal.ai closed $250M at $4B valuation for multimodal AI infrastructure

• Findem secured $51M for AI-powered talent intelligence

If you're not raising nine figures, you're basically invisible. Capital is flooding the most promising, most capital-intensive AI bets. Everyone else needs pristine unit economics or a really compelling story about why they deserve to exist.

The middle just evaporated.

Deel Raised $300M at $17.3B While Fighting Espionage Charges

Deel closed $300 million at a $17.3 billion valuation on October 20, led by Ribbit Capital with a16z and Coatue piling in. $1B+ ARR, first-ever $100M revenue month, processing $22B in payroll annually.

Oh, and they're being sued by Rippling for corporate espionage. VCs don't care when momentum looks this good.

Anthropic Locked in 1 Million TPUs from Google in $10B+ Deal

Anthropic struck a multibillion-dollar deal for up to one million of Google's TPU chips, bringing over a gigawatt of compute online in 2026.

Context: Anthropic's hitting a $7B revenue run rate with Claude powering 300,000+ businesses—300x growth in two years. They're hedging across Google's TPUs, Amazon's Trainium, and Nvidia's GPUs.

That's not diversification. That's "we're too big to risk a single point of failure" insurance. This week's AWS outage just proved them right.

Crusoe Raised $1.38B to Literally Power the AI Revolution

Crusoe Energy landed $1.38 billion at a $10 billion valuation from Mubadala, Valor Equity, Nvidia, and Fidelity.

Their entire business model: Convert stranded natural gas into electricity for compute workloads, managing everything from generation to cooling to cloud orchestration, with a 45-gigawatt pipeline—equivalent to powering eight to ten New York Cities.

AI demand is outpacing grid capacity. Energy just became the critical bottleneck everyone saw coming but nobody wanted to solve. Crusoe did, and now they're printing money.

ShopMy Hit $1.5B Valuation: Creator Commerce Goes Mainstream

ShopMy raised $70 million at a $1.5 billion valuation. They're processing over $1 billion annually through 185,000 curators working with 1,200+ premium brands. 200% year-over-year revenue growth. Profitable since 2024.

Word of mouth, but industrialized at scale. That's the entire pitch.

Redwood Materials Raised $350M to Turn Old Batteries into AI Power

Tesla's former CTO J.B. Straubel raised $350 million led by Eclipse with Nvidia's venture arm participating to convert used EV batteries into power sources for AI data centers.

Climate tech colliding with AI infrastructure. VCs love when two massive secular trends slam into each other and make money.

Uber Just Bet $375M on Avride's Robotaxi Future

Avride secured $375 million from Uber and Nebius to scale autonomous vehicles and delivery robots, with plans to launch its first public robotaxi service via Uber in Dallas by year-end.

Dual-use autonomous technology—rides and deliveries on the same platform. That's a moat.

TL;DR: That's your week. Browsers got sentient, clouds went dark, AI infrastructure swallowed every dollar in sight, and the middle market vanished overnight. The future's accelerating. It won't wait for you to catch up.

Cheers,
Oleg👊

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