Big Tech earnings split AI investors & Chip stocks slide despite records - Tech News (Oct 29, 2026)

Samsung just reported a quarterly profit up more than seven hundred and eighty percent from a year ago, an all-time record. And its stock went down. Why investors are suddenly nervous even about the winners of the AI boom is where we start today. Welcome to The Automated Daily, tech news edition. The podcast created by generative AI. I'm TrendTeller, and today is October 29th, 2026. Let's get into it.

Big Tech earnings split AI investors

Earnings season delivered a clear split in how Wall Street sees AI spending. Microsoft came out on top, reporting ninety-two point three billion dollars in revenue and more than thirty-six billion in profit, comfortably ahead of expectations. Azure did the heavy lifting, and strong cash flow plus a confident cloud forecast sent shares higher after hours. For investors, it's evidence that Microsoft's massive infrastructure bets are actually paying off.

Chip stocks slide despite records

Alphabet had a rougher night. Revenue grew a healthy twenty-five percent, but the advertising business missed estimates, core search growth appears to be slowing, and free cash flow came in negative by about nine billion dollars as AI spending climbs. Shares slid roughly ten percent in extended trading, and that dragged Nasdaq futures lower, with Nvidia, AMD and Intel following. The question hanging over Google is whether it can turn its AI momentum into faster growth in the business that pays the bills.

AI squeezes Apple's flash supply

Elsewhere, Oracle offered a rare bright spot, jumping eleven percent after publishing a long-term free cash flow outlook that reassured investors worried about runaway AI capex. Cybersecurity firm Fortinet went the other way, plunging about twenty-five percent before the open after its third-quarter results, souring sentiment across security and software stocks.

Gemini 4 Carbon limited debut

That brings us back to our opening tease. Samsung Electronics posted operating profit of roughly one hundred and seven trillion won for the July to September quarter, driven by booming demand for AI chips. Yet shares fell, partly on disappointment over shareholder returns and partly on fears that the good news is already priced in. China's chip-heavy STAR 50 index told a similar story, dropping as much as four point six percent even as Moore Threads reported sales growth near eighteen hundred percent. The pattern is clear: record results aren't enough when investors suspect infrastructure spending is outrunning actual AI revenue.

DeepSeek distillation allegations widen

One more ripple from the AI boom: Apple is losing leverage over its flash storage suppliers. For years, as the biggest buyer around, it pressed vendors like Kioxia for steep discounts. Now AI data-center operators are soaking up supply and bidding up prices, and the chipmakers finally have the upper hand.

Anthropic backs court-ordered AI blocks

On the model front, Google unveiled Gemini 4 Carbon, a new frontier model aimed at cybersecurity and complex software engineering. Google's own benchmarks put it first on most tests, though independent checks show trade-offs, including a higher hallucination rate on one factual benchmark. For now, access is limited to selected security defenders, with wider availability promised later.

AI-found flaws and weak PDF encryption

In the distillation story we've been following, new reports say DeepSeek and Moonshot AI leaned heavily on outputs from OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra to train newer models, including work tied to DeepSeek's latest Flash release. Expect renewed scrutiny of OpenAI's safeguards and of export controls.

GitHub and Slack embrace coding agents

And on policy, Anthropic told California Governor Gavin Newsom that officials should be able to go to court to stop the release of AI models that pose a serious public risk. It's a notable stance from a leading lab, putting judges, not just voluntary pledges, in the loop before deployment.

Coding agents strain code review

Security news now. In an update to an earlier story, researchers used AI to help uncover a vulnerability in a programming language that underpins much of the internet. Anthropic's Jason Clinton warned that large-scale cyber disruptions may get worse before defenses catch up. Separately, researchers found that several PDF editors, including MuPDF, Foxit, OpenPDF and iText, advertised strong AES-256 encryption but generated keys from predictable sources like the system clock. In some cases, documents could be cracked in milliseconds. MuPDF has patched its flaw, but files already created remain exposed. Strong locks don't help much if the key is guessable.

Claude makes genuinely fun games

Turning to developers, GitHub laid out a vision of becoming a full end-to-end software delivery system, where developers direct and fleets of agents execute. It highlighted a range of new Copilot capabilities, a credits-based model for enterprises, and a major infrastructure expansion including a multi-region move to Azure. Slack, meanwhile, made its Code API generally available, letting agents spin up dedicated channels where teams can follow progress, approve changes and review pull requests together, rather than leaving AI coding locked inside one person's tool.

The AI productivity 'Slop Cliff'

That collaboration may be overdue. A new survey of more than one hundred engineering leaders finds code review is the biggest pain point as agents churn out more code. Two-thirds say the gap between their strongest and weakest engineers has widened since adopting AI, and thirty-eight percent already let some agent-written changes merge with sampled or no human review.

Touchscreen OLED MacBook Pro arrives

On the more playful side, Simon Willison argues October 2026 is a turning point for AI-made games. Using Claude Opus 5.5, he built several browser games, from a tiny tree-spotting game to a full role-playing adventure, that he says are genuinely fun, not just complete-looking. A useful counterweight comes from an essay warning about the 'Slop Cliff', the idea that heavy AI use can make you feel more productive while quietly eroding quality and understanding. It cites studies where developers overestimated how much AI actually helped.

Robot factory and Virgin Galactic

Hardware now. Apple unveiled a redesigned MacBook Pro with an OLED display and, for the first time on a Mac, touch support for gestures like pinch-to-zoom and dragging windows. It's lighter, swaps the notch for a Dynamic Island-style cutout, and brings back the glowing Apple logo, though it keeps the M5 Pro and M5 Max chips. It ships November sixth at decidedly premium prices.

Reddit feeds, versioned laws, calm startups

In Massachusetts, CircuitHub says its factory-scale robot, called The Grid, can build small batches of circuit boards faster than a typical Shenzhen shop once shipping and customs are counted, a pitch for automation bringing electronics manufacturing back west. And Virgin Galactic rolled out Apeiron, its first Delta-class spacecraft, now headed for testing in New Mexico. The company targets its first commercial flight in the second quarter of 2027, a date worth treating with healthy aerospace skepticism.

A few final items. Reddit is rolling out a split homepage with an algorithmic 'For You' feed and a 'Following' feed limited to joined communities, moving closer to the Instagram and X model, to the grumbling of some longtime users. Legal tech startup Lexifina argues US law should be versioned like source code, so you can read a statute exactly as it stood on a given date, something AI legal tools routinely get wrong. And a profile of Ottawa-based turbopuffer makes the case for calm company-building: profitable, customer-led, and in no rush to chase unicorn status, a sharp contrast to Silicon Valley's current frenzy.

That's the rundown for October 29th, 2026. The big takeaway: investors are no longer rewarding AI spending on faith; they want to see the revenue. Thanks for listening to The Automated Daily, tech news edition. I'm TrendTeller, and I'll see you tomorrow.

Big Tech earnings split AI investors & Chip stocks slide despite records - Tech News (Oct 29, 2026)

Our Sponsors

Today's Tech News Topics