Tech News Roundup: Amazon Burns $42B on AI, Intel Heads for Its Worst Day Ever, a Malicious Claude Code Extension Hits Cursor & More (Oct 30, 2026)

Amazon (image via CNBC)

Amazon's AI spending pushed its free cash flow to negative $42 billion even as AWS grew at its fastest pace since 2021, and Intel is headed for its worst day ever after a weak forecast and a deadly fab explosion. Plus the Binance hack hits $6.3 billion, a booby-trapped Claude Code extension in Cursor, Foxconn's AI server ambitions, GM's $220 million data settlement, AO3 going dark for weeks, Thrive buying ADT, a criminal probe into Google's Finnish data center, Cisco's unlimited-token rewrite, Meta's Style Sketch, Korea's Tesla FSD crackdown, GCHQ's missing drives, LiveWire's warning and NASA's Hubble rescue options. Here's the Lanbrew tech roundup for October 30, 2026.

Amazon's AI spending pushes it $42 billion into negative cash flow, even as AWS posts its fastest growth since 2021

Amazon spent $77.3 billion on capital expenditures last quarter, way above the roughly $58.7 billion analysts expected, and most of it went to AI data centers. That pushed its free cash flow to negative $42.4 billion over the past twelve months, compared with negative $7.6 billion a quarter ago, CNBC reports. Amazon also missed on revenue and profit, guided the holiday quarter a little below Wall Street, and kept its 2026 capex plan at $220 billion. Andy Jassy says it will "spend meaningfully more in 2027."

The good news is AWS. Cloud revenue grew 39% to $45.98 billion, its fastest pace since late 2021, and operating income jumped 55% to $17.77 billion. Jassy says AWS can grow more than 40% in both 2027 and 2028 and become a trillion-dollar revenue business within five to ten years. The Register adds a wild stat from the call: AWS installs a new AI accelerator "about every 14 seconds," and customers grab the capacity almost as fast. Investors weren't convinced. Amazon fell more than 2% Friday morning as the Nasdaq dropped over 2%, capping a rough week of Big Tech earnings.

Sources: CNBC, CNBC (AWS), CNBC (markets), The Register

Intel (image via CNBC)

Update: Intel heads for its worst day ever as the PC slump and a deadly fab explosion hit its outlook

We already covered Intel's budget Wildcat Lake chips selling out on X. What's new is how hard the market reacted. Intel shares were down about 29% Friday morning, on course for their worst day ever and dragging chip stocks around the world lower. The quarter itself looked fine, with revenue up 21% to $16.5 billion and data center and AI sales up 78%. But PC chip revenue fell 5%, and Intel guided the current quarter to $15 billion to $16 billion, well below the $17.1 billion analysts wanted, CNBC reports.

CEO Lip-Bu Tan said the PC slowdown has sped up over the last two months because memory prices keep climbing, and he expects the PC chip market to shrink 12% next year, The Register notes. There's also a manufacturing hit. Tom's Hardware reports that a mid-October explosion at Intel's Fab 28 in Kiryat Gat, Israel, which killed two workers and seriously injured a third, shut the plant for about two weeks. Intel expects it to cost about $600 million in revenue over two quarters and slow shipments of Xeon server chips built on its 10nm-class Intel 7 process. Production should restart this week.

Sources: CNBC, The Register, Tom's Hardware, CNBC (markets)

Image via Wired

Update: The Binance hack is now pegged at $6.3 billion, and researchers say it took about 20 minutes

When we posted about this on X Thursday night, Binance was still calling it a possible hack and about $2.54 billion had been frozen. Now the exchange puts the "estimated total impact" at about $6.3 billion, the biggest crypto theft on record, and says around $3 billion has been frozen. It has suspended all deposits and withdrawals, Ars Technica reports. Binance says the attackers got in through a compromised engineer's laptop, and on Friday it said it had found "additional points of breach."

Crypto tracing firm TRM Labs says most of the money was drained in roughly 20 minutes across at least ten blockchains, after at least 36 hours of prep that included test runs on smaller wallets, Wired reports. TRM and Elliptic both point to North Korea, with TRM naming a unit called TraderTraitor. Binance says it has set aside more than $6.34 billion of its own funds to cover the losses and that user funds are safe.

Sources: Wired, Ars Technica

Image via The Hacker News

A booby-trapped Claude Code extension hit up to 5,000 Cursor users

A tampered version of Anthropic's Claude Code extension, labeled version 2.1.313, sat in Cursor's extension marketplace for about 11 hours on Thursday, and Cursor says up to 5,000 people may have installed it, The Verge reports. Anthropic didn't make it. The fake update grabbed details like your hostname, username, OS and public IP, tried to add an attacker's SSH key, and tried to open a hidden remote-access tunnel back to the attacker.

Cursor pulled it, shut down and rebuilt the whole marketplace, rotated its keys and got the attacker's server taken offline. The Hacker News notes it was pushed out under the real extension's ID, so it looked like a normal update, and only Cursor's marketplace was affected. Anthropic has since shipped version 2.1.314 elsewhere. If you updated during the window, Cursor says simply uninstalling may not be enough, because the payload leaves its own scripts behind. Check for an SSH key named "svc-telemetry" and rotate your credentials.

Sources: The Verge, The Hacker News, Cursor

Foxconn (image via CNBC)

Foxconn wants half of the world's AI server market within a couple of years

The company best known for assembling iPhones now thinks it can build half of all AI servers. Foxconn chairman Young Liu told CNBC its share of the global AI server market is about 40% today, could hit around 45% next year, and could reach 50% within a couple of years. He expects AI infrastructure to make up 60% to 65% of Foxconn's revenue in three to five years.

Liu said Foxconn's production capacity is already fully booked for at least the next year and a half, mostly by AI model makers and cloud providers. It also plans to grow in the US, starting with higher-margin products like AI server racks and data center gear, since manufacturing there costs more.

Source: CNBC

Image via Engadget

GM will pay $220 million to settle claims it sold drivers' data to insurers

General Motors has agreed to pay $220 million to settle a lawsuit from 35 states and the District of Columbia over its Smart Driver program, Engadget reports. Between 2016 and 2024, GM logged things like hard braking, late-night driving and speeding, then sold that data to brokers who passed it to insurance companies. Some drivers saw their premiums go up as a result.

The attorneys general also said more than 370,000 drivers were told they weren't enrolled when they actually were. Ars Technica notes this follows GM's earlier settlement with the FTC, which bans it from sharing driver behavior and location data for five years. GM shut down Smart Driver across its lineup back in 2024.

Sources: Ars Technica, Engadget

Image via Engadget

Fan fiction giant AO3 could be offline for up to four weeks after a security incident

Archive of Our Own, one of the biggest fan fiction sites on the internet, went down Thursday for what was supposed to be 12 hours of maintenance. Now the nonprofit behind it, the Organization for Transformative Works, says getting it back could take about two weeks and possibly up to four, Engadget reports.

Later on Thursday the OTW said it had found "evidence of a security incident" on AO3, TechCrunch reports. It doesn't believe the user database was stolen but can't rule it out yet. That database can include usernames, emails, IP addresses and hashed passwords, so if you reused your AO3 password anywhere else, change it there. The OTW says the site's stories are intact. Its engineers are volunteers, which may slow the fix.

Sources: Engadget, TechCrunch

ADT (image via TechCrunch)

OpenAI-backed Thrive Holdings is buying home security giant ADT

Thrive Holdings, the holding company spun out of Josh Kushner's VC firm Thrive Capital, is buying ADT for $10 a share, about $7.6 billion in equity and $15.3 billion including debt, TechCrunch reports. Thrive Holdings buys companies to hold for the long term and rebuild with AI. OpenAI is a partner and investor, supplying models and engineers to its companies.

ADT will be the base of Thrive's smart home security business. Neither company has said what AI security products are coming, but the deal lands as Apple and Amazon both push into AI-powered home security. ADT already works with Apple and Google and is expected to keep doing so.

Source: TechCrunch

Image via Tom's Hardware

Police in Finland open a criminal probe into Google's data center forest clearing

Finnish police have opened a criminal investigation into Tuike Finland Oy, Google's local subsidiary, over its Muhos data center project, Tom's Hardware reports. The probe follows five complaints and covers suspected breaches of environmental law and environmental damage, plus smaller offenses tied to drainage and water management.

Google has already apologized publicly for clearing land near Muhos without permission. Tom's Hardware says about 816 acres of forest there have been turned to mud, and the company also cleared around 500 acres near Otanmäki for another planned site.

Source: Tom's Hardware

Image via Tom's Hardware

Cisco hands a 27-year-old engineer unlimited AI tokens to rewrite 98% of its old code

Cisco president Jeetu Patel has given Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy, a 27-year-old who came to Cisco when it bought his translation startup EzDubs, a huge job: refactor 98% of the company's legacy code in 24 months, Tom's Hardware reports, citing Fortune. Krishnamurthy had been sitting five levels below his old role, and he pitched Patel on doing it with a team of just two people.

He gets four weeks to prove the idea works. "I've given him unlimited tokens because he's going to refactor code," Patel said, telling him "you can go nuts." It's a bold bet, and a reminder that AI coding agents still have a habit of going off the rails.

Source: Tom's Hardware

Image via Engadget

Meta quietly launches Style Sketch, an AI app that builds a closet from your Instagram photos

Meta has a new AI fashion app called Style Sketch, out now on iOS and Android in Indonesia, Singapore and Thailand, Engadget reports. It can connect to Facebook and Instagram to build a virtual closet from photos you've already posted, or you can snap pictures of your clothes instead.

From there it suggests outfits from what you own, lets you try them on a virtual model matched to your body type and skin tone, and can plan looks around the weather or a trip. It's the latest small test app from Meta after its Waddle World pet game, and it goes up against similar wardrobe features from Google and OpenAI.

Source: Engadget

Image via Tom's Hardware

South Korea cracks down on 80 Tesla owners who hacked Full Self-Driving onto their cars

Seoul police have identified 80 Tesla drivers who allegedly used add-on modules to switch on Full Self-Driving in cars that aren't approved for it in Korea, and they've seized 21 of the devices, Tom's Hardware reports, citing Electrek. The modules plug into the car's internal CAN bus network and get around the regional software lock, which works because every Tesla ships with the same computer.

Some owners bought the gadgets from Europe or China, one built his own using info from GitHub, and the group shared tips on hiding FSD activation logs. Prosecutors are using a law against unauthorized software changes that could affect vehicle safety, which carries up to two years in prison or a fine of about $15,000.

Source: Tom's Hardware

Image via The Register

UK spy agency GCHQ lost track of thousands of storage drives and still can't say exactly how many

Britain's signals intelligence agency GCHQ has lost what an oversight report calls "a very significant number" of removable storage drives, and years later it still can't give an exact count, The Register reports. The UK's Investigatory Powers Commissioner's Office said the passage of time without a full account makes it more important to fix, given how sensitive the data could be.

GCHQ admits its old tracking system for removable media "was not sufficiently robust" and says it has acted on all of the watchdog's recommendations. It's working to find as many of the drives as it can and plans to have an automated asset-tracking system running by the end of the year, which should finally give it a real number, Tom's Hardware adds.

Sources: The Register, Tom's Hardware

LiveWire (image via Engadget)

Harley-Davidson's electric bike brand LiveWire warns it may not survive

LiveWire, the electric motorcycle company Harley-Davidson spun off in 2022, says there's "substantial doubt" about its ability to keep going, citing recurring losses, negative cash flow and limited cash, Engadget reports. That's despite sales rising this quarter and LiveWire holding about 80% of the US market for higher-powered electric road bikes.

It has set up a special restructuring committee to look at financing, a sale, partnerships or other options, and pulled its 2026 forecast. The timing is rough, since LiveWire just started shipping its cheaper S4 Honcho line, which starts under $5,000.

Source: Engadget

Hubble Space Telescope (image via The Register)

NASA asks companies how they'd save Hubble, or safely bring it down

NASA has put out a request for information asking commercial space companies how they could service the Hubble Space Telescope, The Register reports. Hubble hasn't had a visit since the last Space Shuttle servicing mission in 2009, and NASA now puts the odds of it falling back into the atmosphere at 10% by September 2032 and 50% by December 2033.

Hubble has no engines, so without help its reentry would be uncontrolled. NASA's options include grabbing it for a controlled deorbit, boosting it to a higher orbit of at least 600 km, or upgrading it to last longer. Any mission has to happen by 2032. That matters because no replacement is expected until the 2040s, and Hubble is still so popular that NASA gets about seven times more observing requests than it can fit in.

Source: The Register

Lanbrew rounds up the day's biggest tech stories. Every story above links to the original reporting, so click through to support the outlets doing the work.