Innovation

Intel said on Monday that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Classiq, an Israeli startup that makes software for building quantum computing programs, in a move that would turn the chipmaker's long-running quantum research effort into a full-stack business spanning hardware and code. Intel said combining Classiq's synthesis platform with its own spin-qubit manufacturing and existing software would create a user-friendly platform aimed at moving quantum computing toward the mainstream.

A consortium led by Mubbadrah Investment has unveiled plans to build a 3 billion dollar artificial intelligence data centre in Oman, with planned capacity of up to 400 megawatts. The project was announced at a signing ceremony in London during the state visit to the United Kingdom of Sultan Haitham bin Tarik, and it is intended for hyperscale operators running large-scale AI training and inference workloads, with room to expand beyond the initial build.

How do you run a model that is far too large for any single chip? Cerebras, the wafer-scale chipmaker challenging the GPU orthodoxy, has published a detailed technical post answering that question with unusual specificity: spread the model across 59 of its WSE-3T wafers, keep every layer whole and on-chip, and let only the intermediate results travel between them.

Daytona Platforms, a three-year-old startup building cloud infrastructure designed specifically for AI agents, has raised a 60 million dollar Series B round at a 1 billion dollar valuation. FirstMark Growth led the round, which the company announced this week, and the new money brings Daytona's total funding to 91 million dollars — a rapid climb for a company selling one of the least glamorous and most necessary pieces of the AI stack: somewhere for agents to actually run.

Google is putting far more weight behind an unusual answer to the AI power crunch: paying households and businesses to use less electricity at the moments the grid needs relief most. On Thursday, Google and distributed energy platform Voltus announced a tenfold expansion of their "Bring Your Own Capacity" agreement in the PJM region, adding 1,070 megawatts of flexible capacity to the 100 megawatts the two companies first committed in June.

Warp Sciences emerged from stealth on Thursday with 215 million dollars in funding and a plan to rebuild, in the United States, a piece of the drug discovery business that largely moved overseas: making and testing compounds. The round, led by Lightspeed, values the startup at 865 million dollars including the new money, according to the company's announcement.

Some security flaws hide in an obscure plugin. PHP2Shell hides in the engine itself. On October 21, 2026, Wiz Research publicly disclosed two critical vulnerabilities in core PHP, the scripting language that powers about 70 percent of the world's websites, including WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and Wikipedia's MediaWiki software. Grouped under CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, with severity reaching CVSS 9.2, the flaws can let an attacker who has no account at all execute code on an affected server, or read its memory.

Legal AI startup Legora announced on Wednesday that it has raised 550 million dollars in a Series E funding round that values the company at 8.8 billion dollars, a major financing for a company selling AI tools built for lawyers.

Boston-based artificial intelligence startup ASI said on Tuesday it has raised 325 million dollars in a Series C funding round that values the company at 3 billion dollars, a sign of how strongly investors are backing AI built for the physical world rather than for chatbots. The round was led by Spark Capital, with participation from affiliates of Citadel Securities, Meritech Capital and Craft Ventures, among others, Reuters reported.

The United States has formally barred DeepSeek from federal civilian government systems, in the broadest American restriction yet on the Chinese artificial intelligence company. The Department of Homeland Security made the order public on Monday, October 19, requiring civilian agencies to remove DeepSeek-related technology from their information technology systems and barring them from buying DeepSeek products and services in the future.