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Facing growing local opposition, Google, Amazon and Meta are offering communities increased financial incentives, pledging to accept fewer tax breaks, and promising greater transparency about planned data center projects. The companies also say they are working to reduce environmental impact and are assuring residents that the facilities will raise local property values.
Spotify reported 788 million monthly active users and roughly €5 billion in Q3 revenue. Co-CEO Gustav Söderström told investors that Spotify is integrating with AI assistants like Meta's Muse, ChatGPT, and Claude, aiming to be the music service those agents recommend when users ask for playlists or audio content through conversation rather than the Spotify app itself.
On Meta's quarterly earnings call, Mark Zuckerberg described a future in which billions of users rely on Muse, the personal AI agent Meta released last month, to shop, work and communicate through automated interactions with other people's Muse agents. He said these agents could eventually generate more per-user revenue than Instagram and Facebook, and predicted Muse would become 'highly profitable' within a few years.
Anthropic introduced Claude Duet, an AI agent app built on its Claude Opus 5.5 model targeting professionals and small businesses rather than personal errands. The app can generate daily briefings, build dashboards, suggest actions from user data, and complete background tasks via its own virtual machine before seeking approval. It connects to over 6,000 plugins in the Claude Marketplace and can make purchases through Stripe Link or Shopify Shop Pay, though it won't trade securities or transfer money between accounts.
A New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay $25 billion for deceiving users about data privacy practices tied to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, one of the largest penalties ever imposed on a tech company. The ruling follows a Santa Fe jury finding that Meta committed 43 million violations of state consumer protection law, each carrying a penalty of up to $5,000. State Attorney General Raúl Torrez said the outcome shows no corporation is too powerful to face accountability.
Nirva, founded in 2025 by ex-Meta Reality Labs employees Wei Lyu and Jason Chen along with jewelry designer Hanying Hu, closed a $25 million pre-Series A round. Combined with an earlier $8 million from investors including Lightspeed and South Park Commons, the startup has now raised $33 million total. Its first product is an eight-gram pendant or bracelet with a three-day battery that is designed to listen only to the wearer's own voice, using onboarding voice samples to filter out other speakers.
Meta Platforms disclosed in its third-quarter earnings report that it plans to split its stock by introducing a new class of non-voting shares. The company said the change is set to take effect in 2027.
Tesla's third-quarter results topped estimates but shares fell after lower average car prices, a battery supply crunch, and Elon Musk's comment that Robotaxi expansion won't accelerate this quarter. Meta initially rallied on a sales beat but turned negative in premarket trading, while separately offering Mark Zuckerberg a new stock class tied to an eight-year California residency commitment. Broader futures declined alongside chip stocks as Asian and European markets also traded lower.
Meta reported European advertising revenue grew 18 percent year-on-year in the third quarter, down from previous quarters and well behind 33 percent growth in the US and Canada. The company introduced a Less-Personalized Ads option across the EU this year after regulators fined it €200 million for violating Digital Markets Act rules requiring a lower-data alternative to personalized ads.
Google and Meta jointly released a PyTorch-native version of the SGLang inference engine, called TorchTPU, letting Google's tensor processing units serve AI workloads without requiring a switch to Google's JAX framework. Meta's PyTorch-TPU lead Zongwei Zhou said the engine is already running in production at Meta, built with help from RadixArk, the startup founded by SGLang's creators. A matching PyTorch-native version of the vLLM inference engine was also released as open source.
Hundreds of demonstrators gathered outside Meta's São Paulo offices carrying effigies and signs depicting CEO Mark Zuckerberg as the devil, protesting alleged interference in Brazil's presidential run-off. The protest coincided with a Superior Electoral Court order requiring Meta to prove it treated both candidates equitably, after the company restricted over 1,000 accounts linked to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva while allies of Lula accused it of boosting content favoring Flávio Bolsonaro. Meta has denied wrongdoing, attributing any imbalance to two global service outages.
Major tech firms including Meta, Google and OpenAI have rolled out AI agents meant to shop, book travel and buy tickets on users' behalf, but several companies are blocking or resisting them. Amazon has sued Perplexity and blocked Meta's Muse agent, JPMorgan Chase's CEO said outside agents won't get account access, and some users report being unable to book trips via Delta or Amtrak using agents.