Character.AI, the conversational-AI pioneer founded by ex-Google researchers, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and agreed to sell assets to Disney for $20 million — two years after Google’s $2.7B talent deal. What happened, what it means for users, and the lesson for AI startups.
Nvidia shipped 678,000 AI accelerators in China in the first half of 2026, down 44% from a year earlier, as Huawei and a wave of domestic chipmakers filled the space left by US export controls. New IDC numbers seen by Reuters show the world’s second-largest AI chip market being remade.
Epic Games is going all-in on AI: the Fortnite maker told developers on its unannounced Disney shooter to adopt an “AI-first” pipeline with “no more hand-written code” — a first for a major studio, and a move CEO Tim Sweeney publicly defended as the future of game development.
The Wall Street Journal reports Amazon is negotiating to acquire AI startup Decart for roughly $7 billion — weeks after Anthropic walked away from a $6 billion deal. The real prize is Decart’s cross-chip optimization software.
Butterfly Effect has closed a funding round of more than $500 million, co-led by Boyu Capital and IDG Capital, months after Beijing ordered Meta to unwind its $2 billion-plus acquisition of the Chinese AI agent startup.
Sabi raised a $50M seed round led by Khosla Ventures to build a non-invasive brain-AI interface disguised as a baseball cap — custom EEG chip, 100,000 hours of neural training data, and a public debut planned for CES 2027.
Oracle and Tencent have reportedly signed a five-year, $7B cloud deal giving Tencent access to 100,000 AI chips in Oracle’s Southeast Asia data centers.
AMD shares closed at an all-time high of $633.91 on October 2, pushing its market value above $1 trillion on firm MI450 GPU orders from OpenAI and Oracle.
Inworld has acquired Ultravox, the Seattle voice AI startup formerly known as Fixie, for an undisclosed sum to improve real-time voice conversations.
JERA, Dell Technologies and RHAELM have signed an MOU for a 400MW AI data center at the Chiba Thermal Power Station, with capital deployment above $15B.
