Still
Crunchy.

A record crypto heist

Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, says $6.3bn of crypto was stolen in what would be by far the biggest crypto heist on record. Blockchain analysis firms TRM Labs, Chainalysis and Elliptic attribute the attack to TraderTraitor, a North Korean state-backed hacking group, though Binance has not confirmed who was responsible. About $3bn of the stolen assets have been frozen so far, and Binance has pledged to cover all losses from its SAFU emergency reserve, valued at around $1.3bn, plus company funds. The initial investigation pointed to a compromised laptop belonging to a DevOps engineer, and Binance later described the probe as uncovering a complex attack with additional points of breach. North Korean hacking units are believed to steal crypto to fund sanctioned weapons programmes. Markets reacted quickly: bitcoin dropped more than 3% to a six-week low of $76,368 in early Asian trading.

Intel's costly week

Intel, the US chipmaker, fell 30% on Friday after a disappointing outlook, erasing nearly $150bn of its market value in its largest single-day loss ever. Intraday estimates by Benzinga put the industry-wide one-day loss at roughly $1 trillion in semiconductor market capitalisation, with the PHLX Semiconductor Sector Index, a benchmark of 30 major chip companies, down 9.14%. Nvidia dropped only 5.66% but lost about $270bn in absolute dollars, more than Intel. The outlook expects sales at Intel's client computing group, its main cash generator, to fall more than 20%, and Intel guides that the client PC market will decline 10% in 2027 versus 2026 as elevated memory prices push up PC prices. Reuters noted investors are questioning whether AI infrastructure spending is sustainable.

Separately, an explosion at Intel's Fab 28 chip plant near Kiryat Gat, Israel, in mid-October killed two people and shut the facility for about two weeks. CFO Dave Zinsner said production should restart by the end of this week, with the incident expected to cost roughly $600m in lost revenue across two quarters, mostly 10nm-class server chips, and a roughly 2% hit to fourth-quarter non-GAAP gross margin.

Data centres and dearer graphics cards

Data centres have become a volatile issue in Maine's US Senate race, which will help decide Senate control. A September UMass Lowell and YouGov poll found 76% of Mainers oppose a data centre in their community, while Democrats are projected to spend $81m and Republicans $114m, much of it from tech and private equity firms.

Graphics cards keep getting pricier. Nvidia's GeForce RTX 5080 has disappeared from its US store, following the RTX 5090's removal roughly two weeks earlier, while the cheapest in-stock RTX 5080 at US retailers sells for $2,199.99, more than 2.2 times its $999 launch price. Nvidia has denied the RTX 5090 is discontinued but said nothing about the RTX 5080. AMD could also raise prices of the Radeon GPU and GDDR6 memory bundles it supplies to card makers again in November, according to a report relayed through Chinese platform ChannelGate, after GDDR6 prices reportedly grew 8% to 10% in Q3 2026. Hardware Unboxed's survey recorded graphics card prices up 11% month on month.