Alphabet Inc Class C

Tesla's third-quarter deliveries beat company-compiled analyst expectations by 5.3%, though they declined 2.1% from a year earlier, a drop partly cushioned by Q3 2025's tax credit boost. Seeking Alpha analyst Oliver Rodzianko said the biggest takeaway is that traditional EV demand remains resilient as Tesla pivots toward autonomous taxi services and humanoid robotics as its dominant operating models, while energy storage deployment numbers missed expectations. Rodzianko noted that Chinese rival BYD saw its battery-electric passenger-car sales rise 30.9% year-over-year in the third quarter, underscoring fierce competition in China. Analyst Alexander Grover argued the delivery number is a distraction, since Tesla's valuation assumes unsupervised self-driving at scale, and flagged that Alphabet's Waymo is running more than 500,000 paid driverless rides a week across 15 U.S. metros with LiDAR in its stack, while Tesla still does not disclose how many of its robotaxis run without a safety monitor.

ASUS announced that the ASUS Googlebook 14 (CX9406CAA) is now available for purchase in the United States, priced at $1,299.00, online at the ASUS Store and Best Buy. The 14-inch ultraportable is the first-ever ASUS laptop designed for Gemini Intelligence, built on a shared Android foundation for seamless integration with Android phones. It weighs just 2.18lbs and measures 0.43 inches thin, with a CNC-machined magnesium-aluminum chassis finished in Dusk Ash and protected by Nano Ceramic Technology, tested to US military-grade MIL-STD 810H and ASUS Superior Durability standards. The laptop runs an Intel Core Ultra 5 325 processor with 16GB LPDDR5X memory and up to a 512GB PCIe 4.0 SSD, and features a 14-inch 16:10 3K OLED HDR touchscreen with up to 1000 nits peak HDR brightness and a 120Hz refresh rate, a six-speaker audio system, and a 70Wh battery rated at up to 18 hours of battery life. Every purchase includes up to $500 in additional value through a curated bundle of apps and services, most notably 12 months of Google AI Pro and 5TB of cloud storage, plus three months of YouTube Premium, Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe Photoshop, and CapCut Pro, along with 12 months of Luminar and GeForce NOW.

Alphabet is removing the cost barrier to Google Vids, letting anyone with a Google account use its AI video generator for free through the Gemini Omni 1.1 Flash model. Every video created, stored, and delivered adds to the growing volume of data that Western Digital and Seagate are positioned to handle, and all AI-generated videos carry a SynthID watermark. Western Digital's cloud revenue represented 89% of its latest quarter, with total exabytes shipped up 22% year-over-year on nearline products, and its CEO says the company is sold out for calendar year 2026; Seagate has nearly all nearline capacity committed into calendar 2028 and targets long-term revenue growth of at least 20%. Investors have already driven Western Digital up roughly 330% and Seagate about 305% over the past year, well ahead of the industry's 45% revenue growth, and Google trades at a forward P/E of 21.8x versus the S&P 500's 19.2x, with consensus projecting about 9.3% earnings growth in 2026 and roughly 27.6% in 2027. Hedge fund holdings in Google rose from 265 at the end of Q1 2026 to 275 at the end of Q2 2026.

Alphabet reportedly won two separate US antitrust cases in late September, easing immediate legal pressure on Google. Google is helping form a cross industry coalition focused on AI data center development ahead of the 2026 US midterm elections, expected to address questions around power use, data sourcing and community impact from large scale AI computing hubs. The antitrust decisions support the view that Alphabet can keep rolling out AI powered features across Search, YouTube and Google Cloud without immediate structural remedies that break its distribution. The AI data center coalition cuts both ways, aligning with the potential to monetise AI infrastructure and long duration power contracts while spotlighting the risk that regulators and communities could still cap how far Alphabet can push energy hungry AI workloads. Analysts have already flagged regulatory pressure and high capital intensity as two of the biggest swing factors for the company.

Planet Labs launched 20 satellites on SpaceX's Transporter-18 rideshare from Vandenberg, sending up a stack that included a prototype for Google's Project Suncatcher, Tanager-2, and 18 SuperDoves, according to a company press release. Planet Labs established contact and began commissioning Tanager-2, the Suncatcher prototype, and two SuperDoves. Google is using the Planet-hosted demo to run four TPUs with the Gemma AI model in orbit, a step toward space-based AI compute. Shares of the earth imaging satellite company jumped 7.8% in the afternoon session on the news. Planet Labs is down 14.5% since the beginning of the year, and at $17.44 per share it is trading 66.1% below its 52-week high of $51.40 from May 2026.

Google has raised the price of its seven-month-old Pixel 10a smartphone by $100 to $599 for the 128GB model, another sign of how rising memory costs are pushing up prices across the consumer electronics industry. The Pixel 10a launched in March at $499 for the 128GB model and $599 for the 256GB version, and Google's U.S. website now lists the phones at $599 and $699, respectively. The increase was first spotted on Google's online store in Japan and later appeared on its U.S. website, according to 9to5Google. The move comes amid a persistent memory-chip shortage that has pushed up costs across the consumer electronics industry, with Samsung this week raising prices on most of its Galaxy S26 smartphones by $100, while Apple raised prices on its iPhone 18 lineup and also increased prices on some older models. Google had already raised prices across its Pixel 11 lineup by $100 when it introduced the phones in August, according to Bloomberg, offsetting some of the higher starting prices by including more storage in the base configurations. The Pixel 10a had been discounted to $424 last month, and Walmart still appeared to be selling the phone for $499, although supplies were limited.

Alphabet has unveiled Argon, the flagship of its Gemini 4 generation, months later than promised after the company scrapped Gemini 3.5 Pro, which Sundar Pichai had said would arrive in June. Google says Argon matches OpenAI's Astra and Anthropic's Opus on key coding and cybersecurity tests, though its own results show it trailing on two of the four coding tests included, and the model has no public release date, going only to select cybersecurity partners under the Trump administration's voluntary pre-release access process. Google is competing on price rather than raw capability, pricing Argon at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens with cached input tokens discounted 95%, which Jefferies analyst Brent Thill calls a particularly important competitive move at about half the cost of some rival models. The delay came amid leadership churn, with DeepMind founder and chief executive Demis Hassabis stepping aside and several Gemini leaders leaving while Anthropic and OpenAI kept releasing new top models. The infrastructure side is stronger: Google Cloud revenue grew 82% year over year to $24.8 billion in Q2, customers have lined up a $514 billion backlog, cloud now makes up a little more than 20% of Alphabet's revenue, and its cloud market share has climbed to 14% from 12% at the end of 2025, while Alphabet projects 2026 data center capital spending of $195 billion to $205 billion.

Anthropic's confidential IPO filing shows the AI company's 2025 revenues jumped nearly 12-fold to about $4.6 billion, while operating losses more than doubled to more than $8 billion. Nearly 47% of that revenue, or about $2.16 billion, came through the cloud marketplaces of Amazon and Alphabet's Google, up from 11% in 2023 and 32% in 2024, and Anthropic paid $351 million in distribution fees, equal to 16 cents for every dollar of marketplace revenue. Most revenue, roughly $3.8 billion, came from usage-based Claude customers, with subscription revenue at $789 million, and two unnamed customers each contributed 12% of 2025 revenues. Anthropic's non-cancellable hosting and computing commitments rose from $54.6 billion at the end of 2025 to more than $417 billion by early 2026, covering 3.5 GW of capacity, with a fixed compute commitment of $1.25 billion a month through May 2029. The company raised its 2028 revenue forecast to $190-$200 billion, raised $65 billion at a $965 billion valuation in May, and could post its first quarterly GAAP operating profit in Q3 2026 despite an estimated $10-$15 billion in cumulative losses.

In a lawsuit brought by U.S. media companies alleging antitrust violations over the AI-generated summaries Google introduced into its search results, a federal court in Washington, D.C., dismissed the plaintiffs' claims on September 30. The suit was filed in 2025 by Penske Media, the publisher of the music magazine Rolling Stone, and others, who argued that the introduction of AI summaries reduced traffic to their own websites and hurt their revenue, and that being left effectively unable to refuse citation was unlawful; they sought an injunction against the practice and damages. The federal court found that Google's system, which automatically gathers information from the companies' websites and uses their content, does not meet the requirements of antitrust law because there is no clear agreement between the plaintiffs and the defendant.

Google said Thursday that its prototype satellite for Project Suncatcher, built in partnership with Planet Labs, launched into orbit aboard the Transporter-18 rideshare mission with SpaceX. The tech giant said its team has confirmed contact with the satellite, and it is operating as expected. Travis Beals, senior director of Project Suncatcher, wrote in a blog post following the launch that this is the first step in a long-term research moonshot exploring whether space could one day host scalable machine learning infrastructure, and that over the coming weeks the team will gather in-orbit data on how its TPUs handle the physical stress of spaceflight and the radiation and thermal extremes of space. Alphabet holds a stake worth more than $82B in SpaceX, which went public in June in a record IPO. SpaceX, led by Elon Musk, has also announced that it plans to build and launch its orbital data centers.

Google Cloud generated $24.77 billion of second-quarter revenue and $8.81 billion of operating income, an approximately 35.6% margin, with revenue growing 82% from a year earlier, according to an Insider Monkey analysis of Alphabet's valuation. Annualizing that quarter gives $35.26 billion of operating profit, which the analysis treats as a recent pace rather than a full-year forecast. At hypothetical multiples of 20, 30 and 40 times that operating-profit pace, Cloud would account for about $705 billion, $1.06 trillion and $1.41 trillion of enterprise value, leaving approximately $3.39 trillion, $3.03 trillion and $2.68 trillion of Alphabet's $4.09 trillion enterprise value for the remaining businesses, corporate costs and nonoperating assets. Alphabet's consolidated second-quarter operating income was $40.77 billion; removing Cloud's $8.81 billion leaves $31.96 billion, or a mechanically annualized $127.82 billion, implying roughly 26.5, 23.7 and 21 times that residual operating-profit pace before a separate investment-asset adjustment. The analysis warns that a lower Cloud margin changes the calculation quickly: at the same $24.77 billion quarterly revenue, a 25% margin would generate about $6.19 billion of quarterly operating profit, or $24.77 billion annualized, and at 30 times would imply about $743 billion of Cloud value, roughly $315 billion below the 35.6%-margin scenario and almost 8% of Alphabet's current enterprise value.

Fervo Energy said Thursday that it began selling electricity from its Cape Station power plant to the grid on September 30, one day ahead of schedule, making it the first enhanced geothermal company to reach a key commercial milestone. The plant synchronized with the grid about a week ago, bringing online the first third of what will soon become a 100-megawatt power plant, while the entire site could eventually generate as much as 4 gigawatts. The first block at Cape Station took 23 months from groundbreaking to commercial operations, and Fervo aims to complete future blocks in as little as 18 months. Google, Southern California Edison, and others have committed to buying power from the project. Fervo went public in May in an upsized IPO that raised $1.9 billion, and as a startup it raised more than $1.3 billion from investors including Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Congruent Ventures, and Capricorn Investment Group.

Broadcom has agreed to lend Anthropic up to $42 billion to finance infrastructure spending, according to Anthropic's IPO prospectus as reported by Reuters. The relationship spans chip supply, equipment leasing and financing, and Anthropic is set to become Broadcom's largest compute customer in 2027. The arrangement includes a five-year TPU lease commitment at $125 billion, with the TPUs being Google chips supplied by Broadcom that Anthropic is now using. The hosts noted the deal feeds directly into concerns about circular financing, and questioned whether Anthropic can make enough money to justify a trillion dollars in spending, pointing to Reuters reporting on how much Anthropic lost last year and to new reports from Bain and Company and others on the gap between what these companies are spending and what they have potential to make.

Google released its latest AI frontier model, Gemini 4 Argon, on Wednesday, marking its first major frontier model release since February. The model is currently available only to cybersecurity firms, with Google saying Argon topped other models on coding, finance, and other tasks while it patches vulnerabilities before a broader rollout. Google skipped version 3.5, which was scrapped as not good enough, and moved directly to Gemini 4. Reports indicate employees inside the firm were unhappy with the development process, citing safety concerns and the pace of the push. The release comes as OpenAI and Anthropic are now shipping new models roughly every 11 days.

Satlyt, a startup founded by former Google and SpaceX product manager Rama Afullo, has raised an $8 million seed round to build software that runs AI models on satellites. The Sunnyvale, California and Nairobi-based company does not plan to build its own spacecraft, instead positioning itself as a software layer for orbital computing, with Afullo comparing the approach to VMware and Snowflake. Satlyt has already flown its software on two demonstration missions, including a deployment of Google DeepMind's Gemma AI model onboard a spacecraft operated by Momentus that cut the size of a transmission about onboard software errors by more than 60%, savings Afullo says can reach hundreds of thousands of dollars per satellite each year. Its software is set to launch Thursday on a SpaceX rocket aboard a spacecraft built by Indian startup TakeMe2Space, serving three customers: NASA, which is paying to test protocols for cloud computing in space; Stellerian, a space surveillance startup testing image processing workloads; and TakeMe2Space itself. The seed round was led by Houston-based Non Sibi Ventures, whose partner Bernard Harris, a former NASA astronaut of more than 20 years, helped ground the firm's conviction; partner Kent Lucas said the firm invested partly because Satlyt does not depend on the uncertain economics of full space data centers. Afullo's goal is to be live on 20% of satellites by the end of the decade, and the company next plans to demonstrate a shared computing system spanning two different satellites, which it expects to attempt next year.

Alphabet rose 2% in premarket trading after unveiling Gemini 4 Argon, its most advanced artificial intelligence model yet, which the company said delivers improvements in cybersecurity, coding and complex professional work. Accenture soared 17% after fiscal fourth-quarter revenue of $18.68 billion beat its own guidance of $17.75 billion to $18.4 billion and the FactSet consensus estimate of $18.3 billion, with earnings of $3.29 per share also topping expectations. Rocket Lab climbed 4.5% after signing a multiyear launch agreement for 20 new Electron missions with Tokyo-based company Synspective, which Rocket Lab called the largest commercial launch contract for Electron to date. Micron reported better-than-expected fiscal fourth-quarter results, earning an adjusted $33.42 per share on revenue of $54.23 billion versus analyst estimates of $31.61 per share on revenue of $51.07 billion, though the stock fell slightly while the Roundhill Memory ETF gained more than 1% and the VanEck Semiconductor ETF advanced 1%. McCormick rose nearly 5% on third-quarter adjusted earnings of 86 cents per share and revenue of $2.02 billion, both above consensus, while Dollar Tree added 1.3% on a Loop Capital upgrade to buy from hold and Nu Holdings gained nearly 6% after denying it is pursuing a transaction with U.K. digital bank Monzo.

flydubai, the airline of the United Arab Emirates, announced a temporary suspension of all flight services to and from Israel pending the results of an official factual investigation, after unrest broke out on flight FZ1073 last Wednesday. A first officer is suspected of using a knife to attack the captain inside the cockpit and attempting to force the aircraft into a dive, before passengers and off-duty pilots on board subdued the suspect and landed the plane safely in an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia. Meanwhile, U.S. President Donald Trump praised the Boeing 737 Max today, after the aircraft model was involved in the attempted downing of the flydubai plane as it headed for Tel Aviv, Israel. Separately, Google, a company under Alphabet, announced on Wednesday the launch of its new top-tier artificial intelligence model, Gemini 4 Argon, as the spearhead of its Gemini 4 generation of models, amid a fresh push to catch up with key rivals OpenAI and Anthropic after months of delays. Tencent, a major Chinese internet company, signed an agreement to lease about 100,000 advanced AI chips from Oracle over five years for 7 billion dollars, and Huawei Technologies officially unveiled its flagship Mate 90 Series smartphones today, relying on its own developed operating system and a restructured chip architecture amid strict U.S. controls on advanced semiconductor exports.

Vicor, Inogen and Alphabet were among Thursday's biggest stock gainers, while Corteva led decliners. Vicor shares jumped 10% after the company raised its Q3 sequential growth guidance to more than 30% from its previous outlook of more than 20%, reflecting increased royalties from its first non-exclusive license for vertical power delivery technology. Inogen shares surged 8% after the company agreed to divest its U.S. oxygen rental business to Rotech Healthcare for total estimated cash consideration of up to $25M, a deal expected to close in Q4 2026, alongside a long-term supply agreement with Rotech; the rental business generated $24.3M in revenue in 1H 2026, down 9.8% Y/Y, and Inogen increased its share repurchase authorization by $15M to $45M, expiring June 30, 2028. Alphabet shares edged higher 4% after Google provided a first look at Gemini 4 Argon, its latest frontier AI model, which outperformed OpenAI Astra and Anthropic Fable 5.1 and Opus 5.5 in 13 of 19 benchmarks, including a 77.9% score on DeepSWE v1.1, and will cost $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens when launched. Corteva shares dropped 64% following the planned tax-free separation of its Crop Protection business into an independent publicly traded company, Vylor, a decline reflecting the mechanical price adjustment associated with the distribution rather than a conventional sell-off, with the separation effective October 1.

InnovestX Securities has unveiled its investment strategy for the fourth quarter of 2026, saying investors need to exercise greater caution amid rising interest rates and high oil prices, which are pressuring inflation, bond yields, and foreign fund flows. The firm set a target for Thailand's benchmark stock index in 2027 at 1,715 points and said the 1,550 level is starting to look attractive for accumulation. It named five top picks: AMATA, CENTEL, CRC, KTB, and PR9. Suthichai Kumworachai, Head of Investment Strategy & Research, said the prolonged conflict between the United States and Iran creates a chain of risk running from oil prices to inflation, the direction of interest rates, financing costs, and the baht. Dr. Piyasak Manasant, Head of Economic Research, kept his forecast for Thai economic growth in 2026 and 2027 at 2.0% while raising his average oil price assumptions for 2026 and 2027 to 90 and 80 US dollars per barrel, respectively. Sitthichai Duangrattanachaya, Head of Investment Strategy, said earnings per share for the Thai stock market have been continuously revised upward, particularly from the energy sector. For overseas investment, he recommended stocks that benefit from AI, namely Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Tencent, and Alibaba, while in the semiconductor group he highlighted Lumentum, Naura, SMIC, and Biren. He also advised diversifying into defensive and dividend stocks. Joranapong Rattanasopha, Head of Investment Product Specialist, recommended the M-SCHD fund, which invests through the Schwab U.S. Dividend Equity ETF. SCHD currently has less than 10% exposure to technology stocks, compared with nearly 40% for the S&P 500 index, and the correlation between SCHD and the S&P 500 has fallen to about 0.3, the lowest level since the fund was established in 2011.

Total S&P 500 earnings in the third quarter are currently expected to increase 24.1% from the same period last year on 11.6% higher revenues, according to Zacks Director of Research Sheraz Mian, putting the index on track for its 8th straight quarter of double-digit earnings growth. Fourteen of the 16 Zacks sectors are expected to post positive earnings growth, with six producing double-digit growth, the most broad-based performance in recent times; only Conglomerates, down 35.2%, and Consumer Staples, down 0.1%, are expected to see lower earnings. The double-digit growth sectors are Aerospace at 159.7%, Energy at 111.8%, Tech at 42.1%, Basic Materials at 29.7%, Transportation at 14.4%, and Industrial Products at 13.1%. Micron, Nvidia and Alphabet remain material contributors to the Tech sector's growth picture, and excluding those three names, Q3 earnings for the rest of the Tech sector would be 20.6% instead of 42.1%. Within Tech, the Zacks Semiconductor industry is expected to enjoy 85.5% earnings growth in 2026 Q3 on 62.8% revenue growth, following 110.1% and 96% earnings growth in each of the preceding two periods, and the Tech sector's 42.1% growth drops to 29.6% once the semiconductor contribution is excluded. Since the start of Q3, the Energy sector has enjoyed the most pronounced upgrade to its earnings outlook, reflecting elevated oil prices as a result of the Persian Gulf situation, with Aerospace, Industrial Products, Tech, Autos, Transportation, Finance and Utilities also seeing positive estimate revisions.

Asia Plus Securities Public Company Limited, or ASPS, recommends that investors raise their cash holdings to 30% - 40% of their portfolios and shift strategy toward seeking out "stocks resilient to selling pressure" to cope with pressure on the Thai capital market from both domestic and foreign sources, particularly the selling by foreign investors who dumped Thai stocks for 7 consecutive trading days between September 22 and 30, totaling more than 30,572 million baht, pushing trading value to exceed 100 billion baht. The safe-haven stocks are divided into two main groups. The first group benefits from the weak baht amid foreign selling, namely CPF, ITC, KCE and HANA. The second group consists of low-volatility stocks entering their high season (Defensive & Healthcare), namely BH, BDMS, BCH and PR9. Meanwhile, the 5 standout stocks and DRs recommended to cope with the volatile market conditions are AAPL80, on the positive factor of the upcoming launch of 3 new smartphone models in the middle of this month; GOOGL01, on positive sentiment from the launch of the AI model "GEMINI 4 ARGON" that has risen to number 1 in the world; BDMS, on its third-quarter 2026 operating results that are clearly recovering, with revenue in July-August growing 8-9% compared with the same period last year, while the share price remains a laggard; CK, after the unlocking of the barcode law issue supports progress on the 2027 budget and new bidding projects, along with receiving dividends from its subsidiaries BEM, CKP and TTW; and ITC, whose fourth-quarter 2026 profit trend is expected to recover strongly compared with the previous quarter and which is a stock that directly benefits from the weakening baht trend.

Google announced a new advanced AI model, Gemini 4 Argon, on September 30. It said the model has enhanced capabilities in areas such as cybersecurity and programming, matching the performance of the most advanced models from rival AI companies. According to U.S. media, Google had planned to release its high-performance Gemini 3.5 Pro model in June but abandoned the plan. Compared with competitors that have been rolling out advanced models one after another, Google had been seen as lagging in development.

Anthropic reported preliminary Q2 2026 revenue of $11.6 billion, overtaking OpenAI's $6.7 billion for the first time and posting its first quarter of positive adjusted operating profit. The figure is up from $787 million a year earlier, a 14-fold year-over-year surge driven by enterprise adoption of Claude Code, and more than doubles the $4.73 billion Anthropic booked in Q1. It also amounts to 2.5 times Anthropic's entire 2025 annual revenue of $4.59 billion, putting the company on an annualized run rate of roughly $46 billion. The result reframes the S-1 filed two days ago with a $2 trillion-plus valuation target, which laid out $518 billion in compute commitments, including $111.1 billion to Google, $110 billion to Amazon and $161.2 billion to Broadcom, with roughly 80% binding and non-cancelable. OpenAI's operating loss, inclusive of stock-based compensation, widened to $12.3 billion in Q2 from $9.3 billion in Q1, though CFO Sarah Friar told employees that July annualized recurring revenue already exceeded the full Q2 total. The shift comes as Anthropic faces regulatory pressure on multiple fronts, including a September 25 D.C. Circuit classification as a supply chain risk under FASCSSA Section 4713 and a September 30 FTC probe into frontier labs. All figures are preliminary and subject to revision; neither company has filed audited public financial statements, and Anthropic's exact adjusted operating profit has not been disclosed.

Alphabet's Google Services segment posted second-quarter 2026 revenues of $94.5 billion, up 15% year over year, as the company leans on Search, YouTube and subscription growth to fend off Meta Platforms and Apple. Within that total, Google Search & other grew 17%, subscriptions, platforms and devices rose 15% to $12.91 billion, and YouTube advertising revenues climbed 13% to $11.1 billion. Google Services operating income rose 20% to $39.5 billion, with margin reaching 41.8%. AI Mode surpassed 1 billion monthly active users and is driving incremental Search queries, while advertisers using AI-powered campaigns such as AI Max or Performance Max are seeing an average 15% increase in conversions or conversion value at a similar return on ad spend. Management expects Google Services to keep benefiting from AI-driven improvements to the user and advertiser experience in the second half of 2026. For comparison, Meta Platforms' second-quarter 2026 advertising revenues rose 27% to $59.4 billion, with Advantage+ surpassing a $75 billion annual revenue run rate, while Apple's fiscal third-quarter 2026 services revenues hit a record $30.7 billion, up 12%, with paid subscriptions surpassing 1.5 billion.

Morningstar has signed the largest downtown Chicago office lease of the year, taking 275,000 square feet at Google's revamped James R. Thompson Center at 100 West Randolph Street. The investment research firm will occupy that space out of the 400,000 square feet Google has available on the building's upper floors, and is set to move in in 2028 when its lease at 22 West Washington Street expires. Morningstar currently has 1,500 employees working out of 260,000 square feet at the 22 West Washington location. The sweeping renovation of the 1.2 million-square-foot Thompson Center is being watched as a potential catalyst for the struggling Loop office market, where downtown vacancy rates fell only slightly last quarter, partly because adaptive reuse projects erased space rather than filled it. Morningstar founder Joe Mansueto, who is also building a new stadium for his Chicago Fire MLS franchise in Related Midwest's the 78 megadevelopment, has said the firm was looking for a new Loop home as part of efforts to revive the area and called the Thompson Center redevelopment a huge boost.

McDonald's is spending $8.5 billion through 2036 to modernize its restaurants, including a new AI drive-thru ordering system called Archy. Archy is part of a larger system called ArchIQ, which McDonald's developed with Google starting in 2023 and which is expected to see a broader U.S. rollout in 2027. The company says Archy is already taking real drive-thru orders in English and Spanish and getting them right more than 90% of the time, after an earlier drive-thru experiment with IBM called Automated Order Taker was ended in 2024 following tests at more than 100 restaurants. The investment is part of a broader strategy called McDonald's > NEXT, and CEO Chris Kempczinski has said McDonald's expects inflation and relatively flat restaurant traffic to remain part of the picture. McDonald's shares fell about 6% in afternoon trading after the strategy was announced.

Socure has launched U.S. mobile driver's license verification within DocV, its identity verification product, allowing organizations to cryptographically verify mDLs against the issuing state authority when presented from Google Wallet and Samsung Wallet during remote onboarding and step-up flows. The launch follows a September 8, 2026 joint FAQ from FinCEN, the Federal Reserve Board, the FDIC, the OCC and the NCUA confirming that an unexpired, government-issued verifiable digital credential can qualify as documentary evidence under the Customer Identification Program Rule, provided the institution has the technology to extract the required information and still forms a reasonable belief of the customer's true identity. ABI Research projects the U.S. mDL install base will grow from 21.7 million in 2025 to 143 million by 2030, with 40 states issuing digital licenses; today 21 states issue mDLs conforming to the ISO/IEC 18013-5 standard, more than 8 million credentials are active, and roughly 45% of Americans live where one is available. Socure said mDL verification complements its physical document capture rather than replacing it, and that its DocV now supports remote presentation under Part 7 of the ISO standard from Google Wallet and Samsung Wallet, addressing the higher-risk remote verifications that have been supported unevenly across wallets. The announcement comes alongside an extension of Socure's partnership with Xcelerate Solutions to support public sector use cases under the Login.gov Next Generation Identity Proofing Blanket Purchase Agreement, operating within Socure's FedRAMP Moderate environment.