THE RUNDOWN

Binance has released a post-mortem on the record-breaking theft, and it's a sobering read. Hackers — widely attributed to North Korean state-linked groups — combined fake job interviews with an internal AI tool to gain access and move funds over several months. What's especially chilling is that cybersecurity researchers had been warning about exactly these kinds of patient, long-game tactics from North Korea for years before it happened. If you're handling anything valuable online, the security angle here deserves your full attention.

AMD CEO Lisa Su didn't hold back on Tuesday's earnings call, calling Q3 2026 'the largest and most profitable in our history.' The driving force? Data center chip demand that just keeps climbing. AMD is finally eating meaningfully into Nvidia's dominance in AI infrastructure, and Wall Street loved it. The AI hardware race is very much still on.

This one stings. Canva — the design tool beloved by small businesses and creatives across Africa — announced it's cutting 1,271 jobs, roughly 22% of its entire staff. Co-founder Melanie Perkins framed it as a structural shift rather than a financial crisis, but losing nearly a quarter of your team is never a small thing. It's a reminder that even fast-growing tech darlings aren't immune to the pressure to restructure around AI efficiency.

The demand for data center power has gotten so extreme that builders are now strapping old aircraft jet engines to their facilities to generate electricity while they wait — sometimes years — for grid connections and new turbines. It's expensive, loud, and not great for the environment, but it's what the AI infrastructure boom is demanding right now. The scale of this energy problem is genuinely hard to overstate.

Anthropic is developing a system called FlashProve that would let anyone verify that an AI-generated response actually came from the model it claims to be from. As AI tools proliferate and deepfakes get more convincing, the ability to authenticate AI outputs could matter a lot — especially for businesses and governments relying on these systems for real decisions.

Valve has acknowledged a 'significant increase' in game submissions to Steam for review — almost certainly driven by AI-generated titles flooding the platform. The company is making changes to handle the volume, though it hasn't fully detailed what those are yet. It's the same problem Nexus Mods is wrestling with: AI is making it trivially easy to generate content, and platforms are scrambling to keep quality control from collapsing.

Speaking of which — Nexus Mods, the biggest PC gaming mod repository in the world, is now requiring mod authors to declare whether their work used AI tools. It won't ban AI-assisted mods outright, but transparency is now the rule. The gaming community has strong feelings about this, and it's going to be an interesting experiment in how disclosure alone shapes behaviour.

Quietly remarkable: Orbital Matter has successfully 3D-printed the first rigid structural beam in the vacuum of space. It's an early but real step toward building infrastructure — including potentially data centers — directly in orbit, rather than launching heavy pre-built structures from Earth. Space construction is no longer purely theoretical.

Ukraine's drone campaign has exposed just how vulnerable Russia's digital infrastructure is. Russian planners are now rushing to move data centers underground after strikes targeted above-ground facilities. It's a vivid illustration of how data infrastructure has become a genuine front in modern conflict — and why resilience planning matters everywhere.

Palantir had a strong quarter, but the most interesting detail is buried in the numbers: for the first time ever, its US commercial revenue overtook US government revenue. That means private sector clients are now spending more on Palantir's data analytics than defence and intelligence agencies are. It's a signal that AI-powered enterprise tools are moving from niche government contracts into mainstream business — and that the commercial AI market is maturing faster than many expected.

Big themes today: the AI infrastructure buildout is straining every system it touches — power grids, platform moderation, even national security. And the people building on top of these systems, from Canva's laid-off workers to Binance's customers, are the ones feeling it most directly.