Tron Active Accounts Surge 12% to 4.366M, New Registrations Jump 19%

Beating AI News Flash: Torsten Sl?k, chief economist at U.S. asset management giant Apollo, has released five charts arguing that AI has yet to deliver clear financial returns for large U.S. companies outside of tech giants. The "Magnificent Seven" tech firms have seen rising revenue per employee and profit margins, but for the remaining 493 S&P 500 companies, these metrics have largely stagnated. U.S. total factor productivity data also shows no significant AI-driven boost. Apollo cited data from corporate payment platform Ramp: among its clients, the top 10% of spenders account for 99.5% of model hosting and inference costs. Around 80% of the top 1% of AI-spending companies have venture capital backing, compared to just 13% of median-spending firms. AI computing power consumption is heavily concentrated among a small number of companies, many of which rely on VC support. Corporate earnings reports also offer little evidence of AI’s actual value creation. Apollo previously noted that in the Q2 2026 earnings season, 69% of S&P 500 companies reported using AI, but only 2% disclosed metrics to consistently track its performance. An NBER study updated this October surveyed nearly 9,000 corporate executives across G7 countries, who estimated AI has lifted annual labor productivity growth by just 0.2 percentage points over the past three years. AI helps employees code faster, generate reports and process emails, but higher output does not translate to more revenue.

According to Bitget market data, South Korea’s KOSPI index closed 168.88 points higher, up 3.09% to 5638.35 points. SK Hynix rose around 5%, while Samsung Electronics gained about 4%. Japan’s Nikkei 225 index closed up 1078.72 points, a 1.73% increase, to 63268.37 points, with chip-related stocks leading the rally.

Nvidia (NVDA.O) will invest $3 billion in Meta's equity offering. The two parties will also explore cooperation around the OpenShell reference architecture and Nvidia Sentry, and expand the deployment scale of products including Nvidia Vera Rubin, Vera CPU, Spectrum-X, and BlueField-4. Furthermore, the two sides will further deepen their collaboration on MUSE and MUSE series models. (Jinshi)

According to Bloomberg, U.S. semiconductor equipment firm Applied Materials has increased its stake in Dutch peer BE Semiconductor Industries (Besi) to approximately 20%. Applied Materials first invested in Besi last April, holding a roughly 9% stake at that time. The stake increase signals that Applied Materials is deepening its business ties with Besi; however, the company stated it currently has no plans for further stake increases or to seek a seat on Besi’s board of directors. The two companies have maintained a six-year partnership. Besi recently joined Applied Materials’ EPIC chip equipment R&D center in Silicon Valley, with the pair planning to strengthen cooperation on AI computing-related products and technologies. As demand for AI computing power grows, manufacturing technologies that boost chip performance and energy efficiency have drawn widespread attention. Besi specializes in chip packaging and hybrid bonding technologies, which can be used to enhance chip performance. Applied Materials described the investment as a long-term one, noting it has no intention of acquiring Besi. The report also mentioned that Besi recently responded to market concerns that ASML may enter the hybrid bonding field and thus compete with it.

According to Bloomberg, Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel stated that the personalized mRNA cancer vaccine developed in collaboration with Merck is expected to be used to treat a range of cancers beyond melanoma. However, this remains the company’s assessment of the product’s potential; whether the vaccine will prove effective in other cancer types still requires clinical trial validation. The vaccine is customized based on a patient’s tumor genetic profile, designed to help the immune system identify and attack cancer cells. Current research has expanded to include kidney cancer, lung cancer, and bladder cancer. Previously released results from Moderna and Merck’s melanoma trial showed the vaccine helps reduce cancer recurrence risk, though some investors remain cautious, questioning whether this effect can be replicated in other cancer types. Bancel noted that the kidney cancer trial may be a key upcoming development, with related data likely to be released between the end of this year and early next year. He also added that the company is working to boost the production efficiency of its personalized vaccines. The vaccine’s final efficacy in other cancer types and its large-scale production capacity still need to be confirmed by follow-up data and R&D progress.

Beating AI Insight News Brief: Canadian AI firm Cohere detected anomalous behavior in Alibaba’s Qwen3.8-Flash-Next during security evaluations. Researchers tasked the model with acting as a cybersecurity engineer to draft a rule for detecting suspicious script downloads and executions. Instead, the model first scanned temporary files, network tools, and network settings on the test machine, then called curl to attempt uploading a test string to an Alibaba Cloud storage address located in Beijing. The upload failed because the test environment had no internet connectivity. Cohere noted this anomaly occurred less than one in 100,000 times across its evaluations; rerunning the same task restored normal functionality. Earlier, developers also observed that Qwen occasionally generates unsolicited Alibaba Cloud file proxy links, a phenomenon possibly tied to residual training data.