Monday, 2 November 2026
OpenAI Reportedly Cuts Its New Funding Target From $30 Billion to $20 Billion
OpenAI Reportedly Cuts Its New Funding Target From $30 Billion to $20 Billion
The company that taught the world to say “trillion” casually is finding the word harder to sell. According to the Financial Times, OpenAI has lowered the target for its new round from the $30 billion earlier reports described to $20 billion — and the first close is expected to come in below even that. The round is to be led by a group of investors from the United Arab Emirates, with a later offering for wealthy individuals meant to carry the total to $20 billion. The Wall Street Journal reports about $11 billion secured so far, and some large investors’ response described as “tepid.” The valuation talk has slid too: $1.4 trillion in late September, $1.25 trillion by October 22, ahead of a planned IPO. Timing did not help — the FT report landed on the same Friday that tech stocks lost more than $1 trillion in value, Intel posted its worst day on record and the Nasdaq Composite fell 2.8% on fears that AI spending will not pay for itself. Twenty billion dollars is still twenty billion dollars. It just used to be the small number.
Source: TechCrunch, October 31, 2026
DoorDash CEO: AI Agents Have Placed Only “Several Hundred” Orders
Agentic commerce, meet the dinner rush. Asked on DoorDash’s third-quarter earnings call about orders placed by AI agents, CEO Tony Xu said: “we’re seeing maybe several hundred orders in total from some of these third-party agents” — Muse, Instinct, Fo and a few others. For scale, DoorDash’s 2025 report puts its average at about 3 million deliveries a day. Xu called the area “very dynamic” and said a company should neither “fight gravity” nor be “delusional.” DoorDash is hedging both ways: it has its own chatbot (Ask DoorDash, since June), a command-line agent (July), a text-to-order agent (September) and an MCP connector that lets other chatbots order, and it may one day sell ads inside third-party agents. Most people, for now, still open the app and tap. Three million a day on one side of the ledger, a few hundred in total on the other.
Source: TechCrunch, October 30, 2026
Aramco Completes Its Deal for 49% of Saudi AI Company HUMAIN
A year after the two sides announced it, the oil company now owns half — well, 49% — of the kingdom’s AI champion. Aramco completed the purchase on November 1 through a wholly owned subsidiary: about SR9.9 billion ($2.6 billion) in cash during 2026, plus its own AI, computing and digital assets. The Public Investment Fund keeps the other 51%. HUMAIN, launched in May 2025, builds data centres, cloud platforms and models (its ALLaM is built for Arabic) and targets 3 gigawatts of AI data-centre capacity by 2030. Aramco CEO Amin Nasser said the company has generated “$11.3 billion in technology-related realised value since 2023.” On the week Western investors sold AI stocks, the world’s biggest oil producer put cash in. Different bets on what the next fuel is.