Afternoon Brief, October 1st 2026
Tencent reportedly rented 100,000 Nvidia chips from Oracle outside China. Ai2 opened a trillion-parameter training stack. Armadin raised $255 million on a 26,000-agent attack. Washington's cyber director defended voluntary safeguards.
Ai2 opens a training stack tested beyond a trillion parameters
Ai2 released Olmo-core 3, rebuilding its training system so specialized model components stay on while data travels to them. In its preliminary test on eight Nvidia B300 GPUs, a 47-billion-parameter model processed 52,000 per second per GPU, against 19,400 with the earlier implementation.
The larger tests need careful reading. A 1.2-trillion-parameter configuration used random routing to measure system performance; a 2.38-trillion configuration was a short capacity test. Neither establishes the quality of a trained model. Researchers get an open training framework today, with the next Olmo model still to come. SourcesA
Volantis raises $88 million for optical links between processors and memory
Volantis announced an $88 million co-led by Lachy Groom and Abstract Ventures. Its proposed A-1 system pools off-chip memory through optical connections, aiming to increase memory capacity and the speed at which a processor can read it together.
The company targets models exceeding 20 trillion and up to 10,000 tokens per second per user, with first integrated engines planned for customers in 2027. Those are design goals. The announcement supplies no customer deployment proving them. The funding backs an attempt to change the memory architecture that constrains large-model inference. SourcesA
Microsoft finds AI use across the attack process, mostly inside existing workflows
Microsoft released its annual Digital Defense Report, describing observed AI use in reconnaissance, social engineering, malware and exploit development, and activity after a compromise. Its summary says much of that use still targets particular stages of existing attacks. The evidence does not justify treating every AI-assisted intrusion as an autonomous operation.
The report also brings ' identities and permissions into the security assessment: what they can reach, how they authenticate to each other and whether access can be revoked. Assessing the model alone leaves those routes into business systems unexamined. SourcesA
Cairncross defends voluntary safeguards after the agent intrusions
National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross acknowledged legitimate AI safety risks at Thursday's Washington Post AI Edge Summit but warned that direct government control over development could slow innovation, Nextgov reports. He defended government testing and cooperation with developers following Tuesday's voluntary White House accord.
Asked about preventing another intrusion, Cairncross pointed to engineering work prompted by the incident and emphasized human decision-making. His remarks clarify the administration's response to the breaches: improve technical controls and early government access while resisting a broader supervisory role. They announce no new enforceable requirement. SourcesB
Tencent reportedly leases 100,000 chips from Oracle in Southeast Asia
Tencent has signed a five-year, roughly $7 billion deal to use about 100,000 advanced Nvidia chips in Oracle data centers in Southeast Asia, the Financial Times reported, with about 30% paid upfront. Reuters carried the report today and said it could not verify it. Neither company responded to requests for comment.
The structure is the point. Chinese companies cannot buy the top Nvidia parts, and US rules do not currently bar them from renting capacity overseas. If the deal is real, it is the largest known case of that route, and it moves the export-control question from shipping boxes to who may log in. Tencent's second-quarter capital spending rose 176% to RMB 52.8 billion and its turned negative at RMB 13.8 billion, which explains the appetite. Tencent's own filing for those figures was not checked. SourcesBB
Armadin raises $255.5 million, citing a 26,000-agent attack on a live customer
Armadin, the cyber company Kevin Mandia started last year after selling Mandiant to Google, raised a $255.5 million Series B at a above $2.5 billion. Andreessen Horowitz and Accel co-led, with GV, Kleiner Perkins, Menlo Ventures and Ballistic Ventures in the round. Total funding is now $445 million.
Its pitch rests on one exercise in August: 26,000 agents ran 1,300 attacks and about 17 million actions against more than 25,000 services at a customer, and chained 238 findings into 38 verified attack paths. Armadin calls it the largest autonomous AI attack on record. That claim, and the counts behind it, come from Armadin alone. Revenue and customer numbers were not disclosed. SourcesABB
Google's threat team: half of AI-found vulnerabilities allow remote code execution
Google Threat Intelligence Group analyzed vulnerability data through August and found that 50% of flaws found by AI systems lead to , against 26% of those found by other methods. Monthly disclosures doubled from 5,045 in January to 10,740 in August, and 141 vulnerabilities were exploited in the wild from January to August, against 127 in all of 2025. Only 0.23% of disclosed flaws were exploited.
The sharpest case: attackers exploited CVE-2026-1731, a BeyondTrust remote-access flaw found by the Hacktron AI research agent, within four days of public disclosure, and five more within seven days. Agent-orchestration frameworks such as Flowise and Langflow made up half of the 1,500-plus AI-software vulnerabilities disclosed this year. The thin spot is selection: AI tools are pointed at software where remote code execution is the prize, so the 50% may measure where they look. SourcesB
Independent boards split on Gemini 4 Argon
Two independent leaderboards now place Gemini 4 Argon differently. Vals ranks it first of 41 models at 68.9%. Artificial Analysis scores it 52.6, behind Claude Opus 5.5 at 57.6, and Terminal-Bench 4.0 has it at 57.4% against Opus 5.5's 66.4%.
Argon's lowest-in-class hallucination rate of 15% is a trade: its accuracy is 50% against 63% for GPT-6 Astra, so it declines more often and knows less. It also uses more tokens, 110 million on the index against an 82 million median, which eats into the introductory $2 and $10 pricing. Google has published no technical report, and no outside lab has replicated its own table. SourcesCC
Valar Atomics proposes 456 reactors to power a data center campus in Utah
Valar Atomics wants to build Project Beehive on more than 9,000 acres of federal land near Price, Utah: data centers, a fuel facility and waste storage, powered by 456 small helium-cooled reactors totaling 9.6 . DCD gave the figure as 9.4. Construction could begin at the end of the year, with the first reactors live in 2028 and a full build by 2032.
Utah's trust-lands board unanimously approved a lease on 640 acres of state land on September 17th. Nothing here names a customer, a financing plan or a regulator that has licensed a reactor, and 9.6 gigawatts is more than double the state's average generation. The timeline is the company's. SourcesBB
Nebius leases 50 megawatts in South Carolina for 12 years
Nebius signed a 12-year lease with AIB Data Centers for 50 megawatts at a site in the southeastern US, with two five-year renewal options. The first of two halls is due in 10 months and the second in 14. Nebius will make prepayments that, with project debt and equity, fund the build.
AIB, a former bitcoin miner, already holds a 65 megawatt power agreement at the site. Industry rates of $1.8 million to $2 million per megawatt a year would put the contract near $90 million to $100 million annually, an estimate and not a disclosed figure. SourcesAB
Dyna's Taku robot runs a hotel laundry room for an uncut hour
Dyna Robotics unveiled Dyna-2.1 and Taku, a wheeled semi-humanoid with a folding lower body and two 7-degree-of-freedom arms. In the company's demo, Taku loaded and ran washers, moved towels to dryers, then folded and shelved them for one hour without human help, recovering from dropped towels and failed grasps.
Dyna says it pre-trained on one million hours of human video mixed with robot data, and that a new customer site now reaches its production bar in three days, down from weeks to months. One demo is not a success rate, and the company named no customers or availability date. SourcesA
Sources
- A Ai2: Introducing Olmo-core 3
- A Volantis Series A announcement
- A Microsoft: Insights from the 2026 Digital Defense Report
- B Nextgov: Cairncross on AI risks and oversight
- B Tencent leases 100,000 chips from Oracle for $7 bln, FT, via Investing.com
- B Tencent reportedly signs $7B deal to lease 100,000 AI chips from Oracle, TrendForce
- A What a 26,000-agent AI Hyperattack found in a live enterprise environment, Armadin
- B Armadin nabs $255.5M to detect vulnerabilities with AI agent swarms, SiliconANGLE
- B Kevin Mandia's Armadin raises $255 million at $2.5 billion valuation, SecurityWeek
- B The vulnerabilities AI finds are the ones attackers want, Help Net Security
- B HBM prices to more than double next year as shortage persists, Seoul Economic Daily
- C Gemini 4 Argon: benchmarks, pricing and security, NeuralTrust
- C Gemini 4 Argon benchmarks and pricing, BenchLM
- B A startup wants to build a massive nuclear-powered data center on public land in Utah, NPR
- B 9.4GW SMR-powered data center campus proposed in Utah, DCD
- A AIB Data Centers Form 8-K, exhibit 99.1
- B Nebius signs 50MW lease with AIB Data Centers, DCD
- A Dyna-2.1: a physical agent for end-to-end workflows, Dyna Robotics