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AI News Today: OpenAI Vows to Pay Its Data Center Power Bills · DX Today | No-Hype Podcast & News About AI & DX

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_05: It's Thursday, November 5th, 2026.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_05: You're listening to the DX Today AI Daily Brief.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_05: Today, OpenAI rewrites its playbook for data centers after a bruising election night.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_05: China blocks SoftBank's$5.4 billion bid for the robotics business of ABB.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_05: And Tencent launches HIFO, a model it says belongs in the top tier of OpenAI systems.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_05: Let's get into it.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: OpenAI is changing how it builds data centers after voters across the country turned against them.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: On Thursday, the company published a set of commitments for communities that host its facilities.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: It says it will pay the full cost of powering the data centers it owns and operates, so local residents do not see higher electricity bills.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: It also says it will stop using non-disclosure agreements with public officials when it negotiates new sites, and it promised to publish details on construction, local hiring, and environmental impact.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: The move follows Tuesday's midterm elections, where voters rejected nearly every data center measure on the ballot in about 10 states.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: For the AI industry, the message is clear.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: Winning local permission now matters as much as securing chips and power.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_05: Next, a deal stopped in Beijing.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_03: China has blocked Softbank's planned$5.4 billion takeover of the robotics division of the Swiss Engineering Group ABB.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_03: The Financial Times first reported that China's state planner told Softbank it would not allow the acquisition to go ahead, and Reuters and Bloomberg followed.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_03: Softbank agreed to buy the unit last October, as chief executive Masayoshi-sun pushed to make the company a central player in what he calls physical AI, the merging of artificial intelligence with robots and machines.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_03: The robotics business has major manufacturing operations in China, which brings the deal under Beijing's review.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_03: The decision is a sharp setback for Sun's robotics strategy and a reminder that AI hardware deals now face national security scrutiny well beyond Washington.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_04: Microsoft pulls back in Texas.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_04: Microsoft has decided not to expand its computing deal with the British AI cloud provider NScale at a data center in Texas.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_04: Reuters and the Financial Times reported on Thursday that Microsoft will not exercise an option that would have more than doubled the size of its existing agreement to rent computing power at the site.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_04: The current contract stays in place.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_04: It is the second setback for NSscale with Microsoft in a short span.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_04: After Microsoft earlier walked away from a planned deal tied to an NScale data center in Britain, the timing is awkward for NSscale, which has been preparing for a public listing.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_04: More broadly, it adds to signs that the biggest cloud buyers are becoming more selective about which third-party capacity they commit to.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_04: Now a new model from China.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_01: Tencent has released Hi-Four, the newest generation of its Hunyuan large language model, and the company says it now ranks among the world's leading open models.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_01: Hi-Four has about 770 billion parameters, up from under 300 billion in the previous generation, and supports a context window of more than 1 million tokens.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_01: It adds visual understanding and, for the first time, computer use, meaning it can operate apps and software on its own.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_01: Tencent says it filtered offensive cyberattack material out of the training data to reduce misuse.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_01: The model is available through an application programming interface now, with open weights to follow.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_01: Investors liked what they saw.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_01: Tencent shares jumped about 6% in Hong Kong on Thursday to a three-week high.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_05: A big raise for drug discovery.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_02: Isomorphic Labs, the drug discovery company spun out of Google Deep Mind, is in talks to raise about$5 billion, according to Bloomberg.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_02: The round would value the company at roughly$50 billion, more than double its valuation from a funding round earlier this year.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_02: Isomorphic was founded by Demis Hasabis and uses AI systems that grew out of the Alpha Fold protein structure work to design new medicines.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_02: The company has not yet put a drug into human trials, which makes the price tag a striking bet on the promise of AI in biology rather than on clinical results.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_02: If completed, the RAIS would put isomorphic among the most valuable private AI companies outside the large model developers and give it a long runway to reach the clinic.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_05: At Apple, a tighter AI budget.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: Apple is cutting how much its employees can spend on AI tools at work.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: Bloomberg reports that some Apple engineers have seen their daily AI spending limits reduce from$300 to$200, and the company is weighing deeper cuts for some teams, possibly to$100 or less.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: The move is part of a broader cost control push under Chief Executive John Turnus.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: It is a notable shift for a company that has encouraged staff to use outside AI models for coding and other work.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: The story highlights a question many large employers now face.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: As AI agents consume more tokens, the bill for internal usage can grow quickly, and companies are starting to manage it like any other line item.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_03: Turning to the hardware supply chain, Honhai Precision Industry, better known as Foxconn, reported a 46% jump in October sales from a year earlier, driven by demand for the Nvidia servers at the heart of the AI build-out.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_03: October revenue came to about 1.3 trillion new Taiwan dollars, roughly 39.7 billion US dollars, a monthly record for the second month in a row.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_03: Sales for the first 10 months of the year are up about 40%.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_03: The company said it expects AI momentum to keep driving growth in the fourth quarter.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_03: The numbers matter beyond Taiwan.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_03: Honhai assembles a large share of the world's AI servers, so its monthly sales are one of the earliest real signals of how hard the data center spending boom is still running.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_04: Chip designer Arm sets a record.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_04: ARM Holdings reported record quarterly revenue of$1.44 billion, up 27% from a year earlier and above its own forecast.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_04: It was ARM's fifth straight quarter of revenue growth above 20%.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_04: The company said chips built on its designs topped 10 billion units in the quarter, and data center demand tied to AI is a growing part of the story.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_04: But the details gave investors pause.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_04: Licensing revenue jumped about 50%, while royalties, the fees ARM collects on every chip shipped, rose only 8%, the slowest pace in two years.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_04: Guidance for the current quarter landed close to expectations rather than above them, and ARM shares slipped in extended trading.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_04: A Bitcoin miner turns landlord.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_01: Riot Platforms is one of the largest Bitcoin miners in the United States.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_01: Now it has signed the biggest lease in its history, and the tenant is in AI.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_01: Riot agreed to a 15-year lease for its whole Corsicana campus in Texas.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_01: The tenant is what Riot called a leading frontier AI lab.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_01: The lease covers 910 megawatts of computing capacity.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_01: Riot values it at about$28 billion in initial contract revenue.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_01: The company did not name the tenant, though several reports have pointed to anthropic.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_01: With this deal, Riot says its contracted data center revenue now comes to about$38 billion.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_01: Its shares rose about 20%.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_01: It is a clear sign that power-hungry crypto sites are turning into AI infrastructure.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_05: Figma bets on AI credits.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_02: Figma beat Wall Street expectations for the third quarter, with revenue up about 43% to$391 million.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_02: The design software company raised its full year forecast to about$1.5 billion and narrowed its net loss sharply.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_02: The driver was AI.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_02: Figma has been selling AI credits and giving customers more AI features for the same price, and it says that is pulling users deeper into its products.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_02: But the shares fell after the report.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_02: Investors worried that the cost of running AI models is squeezing margins and that bundling features cheaply sacrifices revenue today for growth later.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_02: The tension Figma faces, adoption up and margins under pressure, is one software companies across the industry are working through securing the agents.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: Centra, a data security company based in New York and Tel Aviv, has raised$150 million to protect corporate data from AI agents.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: The Series C round was led by Capital One Ventures, which is joining the company's board, and it is about three times the size of Centra's previous round.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: Centra's software maps where sensitive data lives inside a company and controls what AI agents and people are allowed to reach.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: As businesses hand agents more access to email, files, and internal systems, the risk of an agent exposing the wrong information has become a top concern for security teams.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: Centra plans to use the money to expand its sales operation and build out its agent controls in a market where competition is heating up.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_05: And finally, faster inference.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_03: Together AI, the cloud company that hosts open source models, has launched what it calls polymorphic inference, along with a new tool named Together Compiler.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_03: The idea is that inference should tune itself.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_03: Teams of AI agents rewrite and optimize the graphics processor code behind each model and keep doing so as models, traffic, and chips change.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_03: Together says the compiler can optimize a new open model in under a day and delivered up to 2.6 times higher throughput against standard benchmarks.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_03: It also cut the time to start up an inference engine from several minutes to about nine seconds.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_03: With new open models arriving almost weekly, the pitch is simple less hand tuning and lower cost for every token served.