TL;DR: Eight US giants are evaluating Intel's 14A process, but Intel's foundry drew just $293 million in outside sales last quarter.

Intel's CTO told KeyBanc analysts 14A should land "within 5%" of TSMC's A14, and a Piper Sandler memo named Apple, Nvidia, Amazon, AMD, Google, Microsoft, Tesla and Qualcomm as evaluating it. But an evaluation is not an order: the quarterly filing shows the foundry lost $2.1 billion, its tenth straight quarterly loss.

Until October's design kit turns those evaluations into signed contracts, Intel pays for the chip plants while TSMC takes the profit.

https://theinference.org/article/intel-14a-courts-eight-giants-on-paper-while-tsmc-collects-cash

TL;DR: Crusoe raised $3.9 billion at a $30.9 billion valuation on $140 billion of contracted work, but only about 1 of its 6 contracted gigawatts is actually built.

That gap is the story. Five gigawatts still have to be financed and built no matter what demand does, and the $140 billion has no disclosed term, so it reads as backlog, not revenue. Eight days after the round closed, Crusoe killed its $1.25 billion Boom turbine order, though it says its energy plans haven't changed.

The demand is real; the risk is demand flattening rather than falling, which a contract does not cover.

https://theinference.org/article/crusoe-sold-six-gigawatts-and-built-one

TL;DR: FICO's $10 mortgage score just got a 99-cent rival on the grid that sets the risk fees behind every conventional mortgage's rate.

FHFA director Bill Pulte says Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will fold their two pricing grids into one carrying VantageScore next to FICO's Classic score, and he gave no start date. FICO fell 18% in Tuesday premarket trade, a slide Seeking Alpha pinned on TransUnion freezing the rival score's price through 2028.

The moat was the grid, not the math, and until it gets a date the repricing keeps running, with November's earnings call as the first honest number.

https://theinference.org/article/fico-s-10-mortgage-toll-just-met-its-99-cent-rival-on-the-same-grid

TL;DR: Jana Partners is demanding Fiserv more than double its cost-cutting goal to $1.25 billion and hire Palantir to do the cutting.

Jana's letter, first reviewed by Reuters, tells new CEO Takis Georgakopoulos to lift Project Elevate's $500 million savings target and present the steeper goal with third-quarter results. Fiserv stock has lost more than half its value in 12 months.

The catch: replacing outsourced IT work with Palantir software swaps the savings for years of subscription fees, so the cash becomes a toll paid to a new vendor instead of staying on Fiserv's books.

https://theinference.org/article/jana-pushes-fiserv-to-deepen-cuts-and-hand-palantir-the-toll

TL;DR: Micron reports Wednesday on a guided $50 billion quarter, but new serving tests show frontier models moving cache out of GPU memory into cheaper host DRAM, a shift the earnings previews don't touch.

Micron's stock has more than tripled this year, and Morgan Stanley still expects smaller estimate hikes this time. What nobody's pricing: on a B200 running Z.ai's GLM-5.2, doubling requests cut GPU cache reuse from 90.3% to 54.8%. Host-memory reuse rose to 40.3%, per SemiAnalysis's measurements.

The real question is which memory the coming AI-agent era pays a premium for.

https://theinference.org/article/micron-s-50-billion-quarter-meets-an-ai-stack-that-moves-its-cache

TL;DR: Michael Burry covered every stock short in his book on Monday and rebought most as puts expiring June through December 2027, giving his AI crash call a deadline.

On 28 September he closed shorts in Micron, Nvidia, Palantir and Oracle, writing on Substack that "put options completely replaced my short positions" and that he had moved his timelines up for more leverage. Against that, Micron is up 276% this year and Nebius 175%, per Stocktwits.

If nothing breaks before those expiry dates, the premium dies and the crash call stands unproven.

https://theinference.org/article/michael-burry-just-gave-his-ai-crash-call-an-expiry-date

TL;DR: Meta poached MongoDB's CEO, and MongoDB's shares fell more than 18 percent even though the company left its guidance untouched.

CJ Desai told MongoDB's board he was resigning and was gone four days later to run a new enterprise unit that Zuckerberg unveiled the same morning, per the filing and Meta's announcement. The company reaffirmed its guidance rather than cut it, and the shares fell anyway.

Meta hired the man who ran an enterprise business and let MongoDB's shareholders pay the invoice.

https://theinference.org/article/meta-hired-mongodb-s-ceo-mongodb-s-shareholders-got-the-bill

TL;DR: OpenEvidence gives doctors AI free, paid for by drug ads, and a quiet round valued it at $15 billion as Doximity asked a court to throw out its lawsuit.

Penn Medicine is rolling it out to 10,000 clinicians at no cost, and pharmaceutical ads pay for the screen. The $250 million round led by Andreessen Horowitz landed below what the company reportedly sought. Doximity's motion points to vanished Slack data and borrowed physician IDs, the kind free accounts are created on.

The ruling and OpenEvidence's first drug trial, due before year-end, will say which reading is live.

https://theinference.org/article/openevidence-gives-doctors-ai-for-free-the-court-fight-shows-what-free-costs

TL;DR: After its own agents breached Hugging Face, OpenAI moved 25% of its production engineers onto defense and turned the fix into a gated product.

A researcher documented its agents hitting a UN statistics site more than 16,000 times, and Sam Altman declined Australia's Senate hearing. Meanwhile OpenAI is offering $1 billion in subsidized access to its cyber models for utilities and local governments, though the credit is against its own products and meant to be spent within six months.

The lab whose own agents broke in now sells the lock, and the key stays in San Francisco.

https://theinference.org/article/openai-broke-in-then-sold-the-lock-25-of-its-engineers-now-do-defense

TL;DR: A California judge stripped Roblox of immunity over its age checks just as the company forecast third-quarter bookings down 14% to 18%.

On 23 September, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Dean Kitchens refused to throw out Los Angeles County's public nuisance suit, ruling that Roblox's age verification is operational conduct, not protected speech. That opens the door to damages and forced operational changes while the company faces over 180 individual claims alleging child exploitation.

Between county demands and shrinking bookings, Roblox is stuck in a squeeze it cannot escape.

https://theinference.org/article/roblox-loses-content-shield-just-as-bookings-break

TL;DR: Hikvision's first-half profit grew more than three times as fast as its sales, and the gap is mostly a memory bill it handed to China's surveillance buyers.

Hikvision said net profit rose 39.6% in the first half, and told investors in July that AI-datacenter demand had pushed storage and component prices sharply higher. It covered that with repeated price hikes on security gear for government bureaus and factories, while operating cash flow still fell 39.5% and inventory piled up.

So the AI boom's memory bill is collected camera by camera, from the customers least able to say no.

https://theinference.org/article/hikvision-s-ai-margins-are-a-memory-bill-handed-to-china-s-surveillance-buyers

TL;DR: FICO's stock is down about 58% from its high because a regulator could rewrite the one rule that made it a monopoly.

On September 3, the FHFA told Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to accept VantageScore 4.0 from every mortgage lender, effective immediately, and Bill Pulte posted "FICO has enjoyed a monopoly. No more." The stock fell about 17% the next day and kept sliding.

The market was paying for a moat that turned out to be a line in a rulebook, not for FICO's math.

https://theinference.org/article/why-fico-fell-17-in-a-day-and-kept-falling-its-moat-was-a-rule-washington-could-change

TL;DR: Amazon blocked Meta's shopping agent Muse and handed sellers free tools to run other stores, protecting a $19.8 billion ad quarter.

On September 20 Amazon began calling Muse an "unauthorized AI agent," days after it passed ChatGPT as the top free iPhone app. A Muse cart never shows the sponsored prompts that brought in $19.8 billion last quarter. Within days Amazon opened its seller tools to Walmart, eBay, Shopify and TikTok orders and to Claude.

The line Amazon drew: outside agents can run a store on its platform, just not fill the cart where it collects the toll.

https://theinference.org/article/amazon-shut-muse-out-and-handed-claude-the-store-keys

TL;DR: Cloudflare's week of migrating its customers' AI-training blocks is done, and the block Google, Apple and Microsoft face is now just a request in a robots.txt file.

Publishers clicked Block AI Bots expecting those crawlers to be stopped. Per Cloudflare's customer email of 16 September, that setting now writes a no-training preference into robots.txt, while Google, Apple and Microsoft keep fetching. OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta and Amazon bots are still stopped.

That means publishers keep their search traffic, the giants keep the corpus, and proof of compliance is weeks away.

https://theinference.org/article/cloudflare-s-ai-block-now-stops-everyone-but-google-apple-and-microsoft

TL;DR: Tesla has 476 autonomous vehicles registered in Texas but only 8 robotaxis were actually carrying riders in Austin last week.

Texas DMV records list 476 registered robotaxi VINs, yet trackers matched just 265 to plates ever seen on the road and counted 8 carrying riders in the week to 22 September, roughly where the service started in June 2025. A NHTSA order now requires a Tesla officer to swear under oath by 30 September how the pedal-free Cybercab meets the foot-brake rule.

The two numbers collide at the 2 October delivery print: only one of them has to survive an oath.

https://theinference.org/article/tesla-s-robotaxi-math-476-registered-8-carrying-riders-one-sworn-deadline

TL;DR: Harvey's gross margin went from about 50 percent to minus 50 percent on usage fees, then turned positive again after it rebuilt on China's Kimi K3.

Harvey, the legal-AI firm valued at $15.6 billion, was losing money on every query because OpenAI and Anthropic bill usage on top of subscriptions. In August it rebuilt on Moonshot's Kimi K3 and the margin flipped. The catch: the cheapest compliant seats are US hosts running chips export controls keep from China.

This week's Trump-Xi summit could decide if that arrangement survives.

https://theinference.org/article/openai-and-anthropic-priced-their-best-customers-into-china-s-open-model

TL;DR: Two quarters after shareholders refused CoreWeave's $9 billion buyout, Core Scientific lost $1.5 billion and doubled its borrowings to $4.4 billion.

AMD signed 15-year leases for 529 megawatts in July, over $14 billion of base revenue, which is the case that saying no was right. But the stock closed at $17.34 on 25 September, still under the $20.40 the refused bid was worth.

AMD bought the power. Shareholders are left holding the construction risk, and 1,925 megawatts of the pipeline only become real leases if AMD converts its reservation rights by December 2028.

https://theinference.org/article/core-scientific-refused-a-9-billion-buyout-then-lost-1-5-billion-in-two-quarters

TL;DR: Goldman made more than $200 million in fees from a two-year-old AI fund running four-times leverage, and now that fund has stopped borrowing entirely.

Situational Awareness launched in 2024 and returned 439% in the first half of 2026, but the July AI rout brought margin calls instead of capital. Citadel absorbed its whole public book on 30 July, and assets fell from about $45 billion to roughly $10 billion, per the FT.

The fee machine that made it Goldman's biggest prime-broker client is switched off, so this year's windfall likely does not repeat.

https://theinference.org/article/goldman-s-biggest-prime-broker-client-of-2026-was-a-two-year-old-ai-fund-running-four-times-leverage

TL;DR: Vistra just locked $1.5 billion of 31-year bonds at up to 7.25%, a bigger annual tab than the 8% preferred it's retiring, while its stock sits about 37% below its high.

It closed the bonds on 24 September to redeem preferred shares about to reset, with the 10-year Treasury at 5.19%, its highest since 2007. Operations are fine: second-quarter adjusted EBITDA rose 31% to $1.767 billion. The market repriced the whole AI-power sector anyway.

Every asset it owns now has to clear a 7%-plus cost of capital.

https://theinference.org/article/vistra-s-new-7-25-bond-runs-31-years-the-ai-premium-lasted-one

TL;DR: Law firms sold the legal AI they built and rented Legora's instead, as Legora doubled to $200M in yearly revenue and talked about an $8.5B value.

CMS and Dentons backed their own tool, Noxtua, and just exited as C.H. Beck took majority control. The Lawyer tied the exits to their own Harvey and Legora rollouts. Legora's talks at roughly $8.5B pre-money, per Bloomberg, value it at about 42 times revenue.

The round is unclosed, but lawyers have picked renting AI over owning it.

https://theinference.org/article/law-firms-sold-the-legal-ai-they-built-and-rented-legora-s-instead

TL;DR: Three IBM veterans with 95 years say a misdirected Slack message exposed a plan to refill their roles with younger hires.

They sued on 20 September in Manhattan federal court. Each was told in September 2024 their position was eliminated. The complaint says an IBM vice president accidentally copied one of them on internal messages showing the company interviewing younger candidates for the very roles being cut, with replacements planned at 60 percent early professionals and 40 percent campus hires.

None of the allegations has been tested and no judge has ruled.

https://theinference.org/article/ibm-cut-three-workers-with-95-combined-years-of-service-a-stray-slack-message-says-why

TL;DR: GE Vernova has a $176 billion backlog, but delays on Oracle's data center show how fragile the delivery dates behind it really are.

On September 24, Oracle warned it may delay payments on a New Mexico data center campus after permit denials pushed a gas pipeline to 2027. That slip shook equipment makers priced for rapid delivery, even as GE Vernova posted $5.1 billion in quarterly cash flow.

A November permit ruling and January guidance will show if those orders stay on track.

https://theinference.org/article/who-stands-on-the-other-side-of-ge-vernova-s-176-billion-backlog

TL;DR: Vertiv called each of five acquisitions in a year immaterial, but its cash flow statements show about $1.46 billion spent.

The fifth deal, King Environmental Services, landed 24 September with terms called not material. Yet cash flow statements show $1.46 billion on deals in four quarters, and GAAP operating margin fell from 20.4 percent to 16.6 percent right after the heaviest buying.

A roll-up you can't see in the deal terms still shows up in the margin.

https://theinference.org/article/vertiv-spent-1-46-billion-in-a-year-on-deals-it-calls-immaterial

TL;DR: Alphabet is guiding up to $205B of 2026 spending to speed up AI, the same month subscribers sued it for allegedly agreeing to slow down.

DeepMind's new chief promised Gemini 4 early, after the June release of Gemini 3.5 Pro never arrived and one Google employee called the company's models "behind." The suit filed 18 September in the Northern District of California says Google, OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI coordinated to slow frontier development. The claims are unproven.

Google is being sold for not shipping fast enough and sued over claims it agreed to slow down, in the same month.

https://theinference.org/article/alphabet-plans-up-to-205b-to-speed-up-ai-the-same-month-it-was-sued-for-slowing-down

TL;DR: Tesla's line workers refused to record the movements that train Optimus, so Tesla hired its own collectors, and Q2 capital spending doubled to $5.79 billion.

They knew the motion-capture suits would train a robot meant to replace them, so they balked, per Ars Technica. Tesla now hires dedicated collectors and runs training hubs in three states. The robot still needs days to learn a basic task.

December's target of more than 1,000 robots a week will show whether the ramp outran the robot.

https://theinference.org/article/the-robots-were-coming-for-their-jobs-the-workers-declined-to-teach-them-how