This was the week the AI boom sent Wall Street the invoice. Earnings season wrapped up with record cloud growth and record spending in the same breath, AMD turned in the biggest quarter in its history, and Apple gets ready to ship five products tomorrow. Meanwhile, two security stories — one aimed at phones, one at NAS boxes — both end with the same advice we’ve been giving for years.
Big Tech’s AI bill comes due
The last two weeks were supposed to bring clarity. Instead, they brought a selloff. Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta spent more than $200 billion on capital expenditures in a single quarter — Amazon $77.3 billion, Alphabet $51.4 billion, Microsoft about $45.2 billion, Meta about $33.9 billion — and the market’s verdict was brutal. The four companies lost roughly $665 billion in market value in their first trading sessions after reporting, with Alphabet accounting for about $496.5 billion of it after its worst day ever as a public company, down 13%.
The frustration isn’t that the AI business is failing. It’s that the bill is arriving faster than the returns. Cloud is booming — AWS grew 39% to $46 billion, Azure grew 48%, and Google Cloud more than doubled to $30.7 billion — but three of the four hyperscalers posted negative free cash flow for the quarter, Amazon’s at nearly negative $35 billion. Microsoft was the lone exception, still positive at $18.6 billion. Alphabet’s problem is the most pointed: search queries grew at their fastest pace in five years, yet search revenue grew only 12%, because AI answers monetize worse than the old ten blue links ever did. Reddit felt the same squeeze from the other side, its shares falling about 29% after warning that AI-generated search answers are cutting its referral traffic. And the buildout isn’t slowing — Meta even raised its spending forecast, with future commitments now around $825 billion. The question Wall Street is asking out loud is who can actually pay for it, and for how long.
[Sources: Communications Today (Bloomberg), FourWeekMBA, AInvest]
Apple ships five products Friday — and the non-touch MacBook Pro’s days may be numbered
Tomorrow, November 6, is the big day for Apple’s October announcements: the first touchscreen MacBook Pros (14-inch from $2,899, 16-inch from $3,399), the M6 14-inch MacBook Pro, the M6 iMac, and the OLED iPad mini all hit stores. I covered the M6 lineup and the touchscreen models last week.
The new wrinkle comes from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman: Apple will likely consolidate its high-end MacBook Pro lineup around touchscreen models, with second-generation touchscreen Pros running M7 Pro and M7 Max chips expected in 2027. The non-touch M5 Pro and M5 Max models stay on sale for now, but Gurman questions whether Apple will keep updating them. Touch on the Mac isn’t a one-off experiment — it’s the direction of the line.
[Sources: MacRumors, Dataconomy]
The 14-inch touchscreen MacBook Pro is available to order now if you want to skip the launch-day lines.
AMD’s biggest quarter ever — and a warning for your next PC build
AMD reported its largest and most profitable quarter in history on Tuesday: revenue of $13.4 billion, up 45% year over year, with data center revenue nearly doubling to $8.5 billion on strong EPYC processor and Instinct MI450 GPU sales. The company guided to about $17 billion next quarter.
The flip side is in the segment that used to define AMD for most of us. Gaming revenue fell 40% year over year to $773 million, and AMD expects its combined Client and Gaming business to contract more than 20% sequentially in the fourth quarter as higher memory prices weigh on PC demand. The memory shortage driven by AI data center demand is pushing up the price of computers and consoles. Practical takeaway: if a RAM upgrade or a new build is on your list, sooner beats later — 2027 isn’t expected to bring prices down.
[Sources: AMD Newsroom, The Verge via Zot News]
APT29 turned ordinary websites into phone traps — patching is the whole fix
Security firm Sekoia disclosed a campaign it calls Poisoned Source on November 4, attributing it with moderate to high confidence to APT29, the group tied to Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence service. The attackers used “watering hole” tactics: malicious JavaScript injected into legitimate websites, lookalike reverse-proxy copies (including one mimicking America250.org), and a compromise of the Plerdy web analytics tracker between August 27 and September 3, so thousands of sites served the attack code.
Three exploit chains targeted unpatched devices: iOS 16.7 (to steal cookies), iOS 18.5 (a longer chain that could harvest messages, email, WhatsApp and Telegram data, iCloud Keychain, photos, and more), and Chrome versions 139 through 145 on Android (to grab browser data and saved Wi-Fi passwords). None of it required the victim to tap anything — visiting the wrong page was enough. The good news, and the whole point: every flaw used was an n-day, meaning a patch already existed, and fully updated devices aren’t vulnerable. CISA added one of the exploited bugs, CVE-2024-27834, to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on November 4. If there’s a phone in your house still nagging about an update, this is the week to stop dismissing it.
[Sources: ShiftDelete, Yuphora roundup]
Synology NAS owners: update DSM now, or ransomware will do it for you
Synology warned on October 29 that attackers are exploiting a vulnerability it patched in December 2024 to encrypt NAS devices still running outdated versions of DiskStation Manager, then demand a ransom. The ransomware, known as C3RB3R, appends a .L0CK3D extension to encrypted files and points victims at a dark-web portal to buy a decryptor for thousands of dollars. Synology points to advisory SA-24:20, which covers a critical remote-code-execution flaw (CVE-2024-10441) and two lesser ones.
Shadowserver tracks more than 380,000 Synology NAS devices reachable directly from the internet — that’s the attack surface. The fix is unglamorous and free: update DSM to 7.2.2-72806-1 or later, turn on automatic updates, and don’t expose the DSM management web interface to the internet. The box holding your photos and backups is exactly the box attackers want, and a patch from nearly two years ago is all that stands between it and encryption.
[Sources: Cyber World Ops (reporting BleepingComputer), Technine]
SpaceX picks Qualcomm to build its own 5G network
SpaceX has chosen Qualcomm’s Dragonwing platforms — the QRU100 radio and QDU100 baseband, plus Layer 1 software — for the ground side of Starlink Mobile’s planned nationwide terrestrial 5G network in the US. Deployment is slated to begin in 2027, with tens of thousands of cell sites over a multi-year agreement. The pitch is a hybrid network: phones use Starlink satellites where towers don’t reach and SpaceX’s own ground stations where they do. No financial terms, pricing, or coverage map yet — this is a supplier deal, not a launched network — but it’s the clearest sign yet that SpaceX intends to become a US wireless carrier in its own right.
[Sources: Notebookcheck, The Motley Fool]
Quick hits
- Anthropic’s IPO watch: reports based on the Financial Times say Anthropic told prospective investors its third-quarter revenue reached about $16.8 billion ahead of a Nasdaq listing under the ticker “ANT.” No listing date has been confirmed yet — the watch continues.
- Intel’s rough week: Intel plunged nearly 29% despite double-digit revenue growth, collateral damage in the same earnings-season repricing.
That’s the week. The through-line is hard to miss: the AI buildout is real, the money is real, and the bill is now real too — and on the security side, both of this week’s big scares were fixed by patches that already existed. Check your updates, check your backups, and if you’re buying RAM, don’t wait.
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