Weekend AI digest, November 7–8

Felix Laurent 8 Nov 2026 4 min read

News

The biggest AI news of the weekend was about the hardware AI runs on. Anthropic paid about $3.4B for 1.7 GW of gas generators, the Financial Times reports. Microchip said AI customers took over whole factories at its outside suppliers. US imports of chips and computers hit $86.9B in September. Below are the stories of Saturday and Sunday, plus the late Friday news and the weekend's rumours.

Anthropic buys $3.4B of gas generators

Anthropic paid about $3.4B for 1.7 GW of heavy-duty gas generators from OnePWR Solutions, a supplier in San Antonio, the Financial Times reports. The deal was signed in late September, weeks before Anthropic filed for its IPO. Anthropic did not buy OnePWR itself, and none of its staff moved over.

Neither company commented, and Reuters said it could not immediately verify the report. Our breakdown of the deal is here.

AI buyers crowd out the rest of the chip market

Microchip CEO Steve Sanghi said AI companies "took over the whole factory" at outside assembly and test houses. Standard lead times stretched from four to eight weeks to six to 32 weeks. Microchip shares fell 10% on Friday, 24/7 Wall St. reports.

Fresh trade data shows the scale. US imports of chips and computers rose $12.1B in September to $86.9B, up 151% from a year earlier. That is a pace of about $1.04 trillion a year, 24/7 Wall St. reports.

SemiAnalysis visited China's answer to this buildout in Inner Mongolia. The Galaxy campus near Ulanqab is planned for up to 800 MW. Its first 120 MW phase was built within a year at about a fifth of US costs. About 30,000 workers are building 22 data-center projects in the area.

DeepSeek Harness reaches 1.54M daily users

DeepSeek's open-source agent app Harness reached 1.54 million daily users on November 4, the company said. It launched on August 13 and had about 271,000 daily users at the end of September. DeepSeek published the figures in English on November 8; more in our article.

Smaller updates

Four smaller stories filled the weekend.

Amazon set up a Personal Robotics Group around Sprout, the 3.5-foot humanoid from Fauna Robotics, which it bought in March. Job posts mention a "new-to-world robot product", CNBC reports.
Meta chief strategy officer Dave Wehner, Meta's CFO from 2014 to 2022, is leaving to become CFO of AI inference startup Fireworks. Fireworks was valued at $17.5B in July, CNBC reports.
Together AI says its agents more than tripled the throughput of StepFun's Step 5 Preview, to 3.47 times the starting speed. We read the results here.
Theseus Robotics, a Zurich startup, came out of stealth with software that turns wheeled humanoids into overnight shelf restockers. Pilots with retailers are planned for 2027, Runtime Wire reports.

Two of the four are about robots moving into homes and stores.

Late Friday updates

Eight stories landed after our Friday digest went out.

A federal judge let the core of the Claude Max class action go ahead. Subscribers say the promised "5x or 20x more usage" than Pro does not hold over a week; we covered the ruling here.
Groq is pitching a Series B at an $8B valuation, more than double its last round, Bloomberg reports. More in our article.
Cohere's three founders became Canada's first AI billionaires after the company's latest round, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index shows. Details here.
OpenRouter processed 790 trillion tokens in October, its biggest month, and agents used 76% of them. We read the data here.
Nous Research released Arete-27B, a Qwen3.8-27B fine-tune that it says cuts answers repeating the Chinese Communist Party line from 22% to about 1%. More in our article.
OpenAI added Remix to ChatGPT Sites, so Business and Enterprise users can copy a teammate's site and edit it in chat. Details here.
Axon is investing $1.2B in drone maker Skydio and becomes its exclusive distributor to US and Canadian police. Only about $255M is new money for Skydio, DroneXL reports.
We tested Gemini Omni 1.2 Flash against Seedance 2.0 on five hard video scenes, and Seedance won 4 to 2.5. The results are here.

Three of the eight are about money flowing to AI infrastructure and labs.

Rumours

Six more stories circulated over the weekend, but we could not confirm them with the companies or read the primary report.

Apple CEO John Ternus has reportedly pushed for an agentic Siri that could ship as early as 2027, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports.
A new Devin CLI build lists a "Silicon" model family in five tiers, and some users link it to unreleased Anthropic codenames. Neither Cognition nor Anthropic has confirmed it.
xAI reportedly turned on an invisible text watermark in Grok API responses on November 7, according to a third-party blog. xAI has not published a statement we could find.
Anthropic reportedly emailed enterprise customers that an outside security firm may have viewed their plan and spend data in late October. We could not find the notice on Anthropic's own pages.
Thinking Machines Lab is reportedly close to raising $5B at a $40B valuation, Business Insider reports. Fireworks is reportedly in early talks at $30B to $40B.
A security firm says Claude Code's "don't ask again" setting has leaked thousands of secrets into public GitHub repos. We could not read the report.

Treat all six as unconfirmed until the companies announce them.

What the weekend was about

The weekend showed AI demand reaching every layer of hardware. Anthropic bought 1.7 GW of generators, and Microchip says AI buyers filled its suppliers' factories. US chip and computer imports now run at about $1 trillion a year.

The software side kept growing too. DeepSeek Harness went from 271,000 to 1.54 million daily users in about five weeks, and agents used 76% of OpenRouter's October traffic. On November 7–8 the shortage spread to power and chip packaging, and the agents that need all this hardware kept multiplying.