TSMC invests in Anthropic, OpenAI & CoreWeave revenue surges 168 percent - Tech News (Nov 12, 2026)

The world's biggest chipmaker isn't just building the hardware behind AI anymore. It now wants a piece of the companies writing the software, and it's putting a billion dollars on the table to get it. Welcome to The Automated Daily, tech news edition. The podcast created by generative AI. I'm TrendTeller, and today is November 12th, 2026. Coming up: a blowout quarter for an AI infrastructure favorite, a fresh wave of frontier models from Google, Alibaba and Baidu, an AI that sits in on your video calls, plus new milestones in genomics, quantum computing and solar-powered flight. Let's get into it.

TSMC invests in Anthropic, OpenAI

Let's start with the money flowing through AI. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing's board has approved plans to invest 500 million dollars each in Anthropic and OpenAI. TSMC already makes the chips that much of the AI industry depends on, so taking direct stakes in two of the leading model developers is a notable change. It suggests chipmakers no longer want to be just suppliers. They want a seat at the table with the companies shaping where AI goes next, and some exposure to the upside if those companies keep growing.

CoreWeave revenue surges 168 percent

Speaking of upside, CoreWeave delivered a quarter that investors clearly liked. The AI cloud provider reported third-quarter revenue of 3.66 billion dollars, up 168 percent from a year ago, and raised its full-year forecast for 2026. Shares climbed nearly 25 percent on the news. CoreWeave rents out data center capacity to AI companies, so many people treat it as a gauge of how hungry the industry still is for computing power. By that measure, demand doesn't look like it's slowing down.

Google releases Gemini 4 Carbon

Now to the model race, which picked up again this week. Google has made Gemini 4 Carbon broadly available. It was first offered to a select group of cybersecurity defenders, and Google calls it its strongest model yet. The company is also pricing introductory access below comparable models from OpenAI and Anthropic, which is a pretty direct challenge on cost as well as capability.

Alibaba Qwen4-Max and Baidu ERNIE

Chinese developers are keeping pace. Alibaba released a preview of Qwen4-Max, the first model in its Qwen 4 family, with a context window of up to one million tokens. In plain terms, that means it can handle very long documents or conversations in one go. Alibaba didn't publish benchmarks, a model card, or a parameter count at launch, though, so for now its performance and safety claims are hard to check. Baidu, meanwhile, launched ERNIE 5.5 Flash Preview. It's a large model designed to use only a small slice of its capacity at any moment, which keeps it efficient. Baidu says open-source weights will arrive before November 25th, which would make another powerful Chinese model freely available to developers.

Gemini Decisions API for classification

Google also had a couple of smaller but practical launches. The first is the Gemini Decisions API. Instead of writing out an answer word by word, it picks from answer choices you've already defined, like yes or no, multiple choice, or a scoring rubric, and tells you how confident it is. It can work through as many as a thousand questions in a single pass. It's not flashy, but for companies sorting large amounts of data or grading model outputs, it could save real time and money.

Gemini Live arrives on CarPlay

The second is for drivers. Gemini Live is coming to Apple CarPlay, so you can start or pick up a voice conversation with Gemini from a dedicated screen in the car, and those chats sync with the iPhone app. It's an interesting move: Google is putting its assistant right inside Apple's in-car platform, a space where Siri has traditionally been the default.

Anthropic launches Claude Meetings tools

Anthropic is also branching out. The company announced a set of workplace tools built around Claude Meetings, an AI that can join video calls, draft plans, and start working on tasks while the discussion is still going. There are also new tools for collaborative whiteboarding and spreadsheets. Until now Anthropic has been best known for coding and enterprise assistants. This puts it in direct competition with Microsoft, Google, OpenAI and Meta for everyday office work. Whether people actually want an AI colleague in their meetings is still an open question.

DeepMind unveils AlphaGenome 2

Turning to science, Google DeepMind unveiled AlphaGenome 2. The model predicts how changes in DNA affect gene activity in specific types of human cells. That's the kind of question researchers ask when they're trying to work out why a particular mutation might be linked to disease. It's available through an API for non-commercial research, and DeepMind is clear that it isn't approved for clinical use. Still, it could speed up a lot of lab work.

IBM links Nighthawk quantum processors

In quantum computing, IBM says it plans to connect two of its Nighthawk processors into a single system with 1,040 qubits by 2027. Making individual chips bigger only gets you so far, so linking processors together is seen as an important way to scale up. It's another step in IBM's long effort to build quantum machines that are useful for real commercial problems, not just experiments.

Solar drone and counter-drone tech

Finally, a couple of stories from the skies. China's first commercial-grade small-to-medium aircraft powered entirely by solar energy has completed its maiden flight. The drone, called Light Cavalry, has an eight-meter wingspan and is designed to stay aloft for 30 hours, which makes it a candidate for surveillance, communications relays and other long missions. On the defensive side, Israeli company BlincVision has started working with Estonia's Meridein Grupp on drone detection. The two have completed an initial technical evaluation and are now looking at ways to spot, classify and track drones quickly. Together, these stories show how much attention is going into putting drones in the air, and into finding them once they're there.

That's the roundup for November 12th, 2026. TSMC is buying into the AI labs, CoreWeave is riding the infrastructure wave, and the model race keeps getting more crowded, from Silicon Valley to Hangzhou and Beijing. Thanks for listening to The Automated Daily, tech news edition. I'm TrendTeller. See you tomorrow.

TSMC invests in Anthropic, OpenAI & CoreWeave revenue surges 168 percent - Tech News (Nov 12, 2026)

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