Arena, the crowdsourced AI model leaderboard that began as a UC Berkeley research project, raised a $200 million Series B at a $3.1 billion valuation, up from $1.7 billion ten months earlier, led by Lightspeed and Khosla Ventures with a16z and Salesforce Ventures participating. The company says its commercial AI Evaluations product reached a $100 million annualized run rate in June, and it launched an “alignment” leaderboard ranking models on unauthorized actions and deceptive behavior.
KT Cloud will be the design-build-operate partner for a 50MW data center in Incheon’s Cheongna district, with construction starting in the fourth quarter of 2026 and completion targeted for the first quarter of 2030. The campus gets a dedicated “AI zone” with direct-to-chip liquid cooling; KT Cloud now targets 1 gigawatt of data center capacity by 2031, up from its earlier 320MW-by-2030 goal.
Four-hour battery storage is now cheaper than open-cycle gas turbines in all 43 markets Wood Mackenzie surveyed across every continent, a decisive shift for data center backup power economics. Gas turbine procurement now takes two to four years, with closed-cycle waitlists into the early 2030s, while batteries keep getting cheaper; in China, storage costs sit 55 percent below neighboring markets.
Senator Maggie Hassan, the ranking Democrat on the Joint Economic Committee, wrote to Trump Mobile CEO Patrick O’Brien alleging the carrier has no FCC authorization: no robocall-mitigation filing under Trump Mobile or its legal name T1 Mobile LLC, an incomplete filing from partner Liberty Mobile Wireless, and no Section 214 authorization for its advertised international calling to more than 230 countries. Answers are due October 29; the allegations are the senator’s, and Trump Mobile has not responded.
GitHub is rebuilding its Git storage architecture from scratch to handle AI-agent load, claiming a 35x write improvement in internal tests by decoupling writes from reads and moving to object storage. The move follows a doubling of GitHub traffic between September 2025 and August 2026, with September 2026 alone seeing 7.38 billion commits.
Uber and China’s Pony.ai will begin testing Gen-7 robotaxis in London in the coming weeks under their expanded European partnership, which targets 2,000 robotaxis. It is Uber’s second London AV push alongside its investment in British startup Wayve, and Pony.ai’s first European market after Middle East operations.
Vesta raised $30 million to build agent swarms for mortgage lenders, a niche where document-heavy workflows are a natural fit for multi-agent systems. And Cal AI’s 19-year-old founder raised $10 million for his next AI startup, single-sourced to TechCrunch.