BioWare Shuts Down, DeepSeek Opens DeepInfer, NVHBM Standardization and More

AI

Flapping Airplanes Raises $1B Series A at $6B Valuation

AI research lab Flapping Airplanes has closed a $1 billion Series A round co-led by Index Ventures and Lux Capital. NVIDIA, Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia, Valor Equity Partners, Jump Trading, and XTX Ventures also participated.

Founded in late 2025, the San Francisco lab is pursuing AI models that learn from far less data than today’s frontier systems. No commercial product has shipped yet. The $6 billion valuation marks a fourfold jump from the $1.5 billion figure set during its $180 million seed round in January.

A $1 billion Series A is exceptionally large even by AI standards. It reflects intense investor appetite for approaches that could cut training costs and infrastructure demands.

Pigment Raises $250M Series E at $2.3B Valuation

Paris-based AI business planning platform Pigment has raised $250 million in a Series E led by the Scaleup Europe Fund, managed by EQT. NVIDIA, WIL (World Innovation Lab), Greenoaks, ICONIQ, IVP, and Meritech also participated.

Pigment crossed $100 million in annual recurring revenue earlier this year, doubling year over year. The company plans to invest in its Graphite compute engine and AI planning agents that can run entire workflows from start to finish.

Since its founding in 2019, Pigment has raised nearly $600 million. The Scaleup Europe Fund, backed by the EU’s 5 billion euro initiative to grow European tech champions, serving as lead investor is a notable signal.

Blacksmith Hits $1B Valuation on $66M Sequoia-Led Series C

Code-testing CI platform Blacksmith has raised $66 million in a Series C led by Sequoia Capital, reaching unicorn status. Just two months prior, a $45 million Series B led by Peak XV Partners valued the company at $550 million.

The growth in AI coding tools such as Cursor, Codex, and Claude Code has dramatically increased how much code gets written and how urgently it needs testing. Blacksmith’s weekly CI jobs surged from 5 million in January to over 90 million now, an 18x increase. ARR grew 17x over the same period.

More than 10,000 companies use the service, including Ashby, Granola, Handshake, and LangChain. Most of the funding will go toward computing capacity.

Big Tech

SK hynix Discontinues Solidigm IPO Review

SK hynix has filed a Form 6-K with the SEC stating that its US subsidiary Solidigm will discontinue its review of pre-IPO capital raising and IPO plans. The company cited capital market conditions and other factors.

Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley had been tapped to manage the offering. Reports had suggested the IPO could raise roughly $10 billion at a valuation of up to $150 billion. As recently as early September, SK hynix maintained that no decisions had been made.

The withdrawal comes amid a broader semiconductor stock sell-off and growing skepticism around AI investment returns. Solidigm was formed in 2021 after SK hynix acquired Intel’s NAND flash business.

Huawei Passes 100 Million Kirin Chip Milestone

Huawei announced at a chip technology briefing in Shanghai that cumulative shipments of Kirin-powered devices have surpassed 100 million since its 2023 return to the smartphone market. It was the company’s first chip briefing in six years.

The new Kirin 9050 uses a proprietary LogicFolding architecture that integrates over 50 million hybrid bonds and improves transistor density by 53.5%. This is a significant technical achievement given the US sanctions that cut off Huawei’s access to advanced foundry services.

Testing of the next-generation Kirin 2027 chip is already underway, with preliminary results meeting internal targets, according to Yicai Global.

NVIDIA Pushes NVHBM Memory Standardization at TSMC

NVIDIA has asked Samsung, SK hynix, and Micron to standardize NVHBM base die manufacturing on TSMC’s 3nm process. NVHBM is a next-generation high-bandwidth memory specification unveiled by NVIDIA in August.

Reuters reports that Samsung has agreed and will work with TSMC for the base dies. Micron has confirmed it will outsource both NVHBM and HBM4E base dies to TSMC, targeting volume production in 2027. SK hynix has not publicly confirmed its plans.

NVIDIA claims up to 30% more bandwidth and 15% lower power consumption compared to standard HBM4E. Consolidating memory manufacturing on a single foundry process would represent a significant structural shift for the industry.

Open Source

DeepSeek Open-Sources DeepInfer Inference Engine Under Apache 2.0

DeepSeek has released DeepInfer, the inference framework powering its production services, under the Apache 2.0 license.

The engine supports both NVIDIA GPUs and Huawei Ascend processors. Features include distributed inference, speculative decoding, and structured output. A companion tool, deepseek-recipe, was also released. Currently, only offline inference for the DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash model is supported.

In April 2025, DeepSeek had said publishing the full engine was impractical due to tight coupling with internal infrastructure. This release reverses that position. The company plans to add code for future models as they ship.

Microsoft Open-Sources Scope, an AI Coding Agent Evaluation Tool

Microsoft has released Scope under the MIT license on October 20. Rather than writing code itself, Scope evaluates existing coding agents.

It runs a single task through multiple agents, such as GitHub Copilot and Claude Code, simultaneously. An LLM-based judge service scores each run. Microsoft notes that important conclusions still require human review.

The tool targets teams maintaining SDKs, documentation, or MCP servers. It fills a gap in the ecosystem: as coding agents proliferate, teams need a systematic way to compare them on their own tasks rather than relying on public benchmarks alone.

Gaming

EA Shuts Down BioWare After 30 Years, Cancels Next Mass Effect

EA has closed BioWare and canceled development of the next Mass Effect game. The news came through an internal letter from EA executives, followed by a public farewell from BioWare on the same day.

Approximately 400 employees will be laid off, representing about 3% of EA’s total workforce. The closure is part of a broader restructuring following EA’s $55 billion take-private deal. Some developers are being moved to other EA projects.

BioWare shaped the RPG genre through franchises like Baldur’s Gate, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age. The Edmonton-based studio’s workspace is also shutting down.

DON’T NOD Enters Judicial Safeguard as Tencent Declines Further Investment

Life is Strange developer DON’T NOD received approval for a sauvegarde procedure from a Paris court on October 19. CEO Oskar Guilbert said the company’s funds are insufficient to meet current business needs and develop new projects.

The initial six-month period freezes existing debts and can be extended by another six months. A court-appointed administrator will oversee the restructuring. Largest shareholder Tencent has reportedly indicated it has no plans to inject additional capital.

First-half 2026 revenue fell 14% year over year to 6.1 million euros. The company had previously warned that without additional funding, operations could be at risk after January 31, 2027.

References

Toward More Efficient AI: Leading Flapping Airplanes’ $1B Series A — Index Ventures
AI lab Flapping Airplanes is now worth $6B — The Next Web
Scaleup Europe Fund leads $250M funding round in Pigment — Tech.eu
Blacksmith hits $1 billion valuation after $66 million Series C led by Sequoia — Crypto Briefing
SK hynix Inc. Form 6-K — SEC
Huawei passes 100 million Kirin chip milestone — South China Morning Post
Huawei Announces 100 Million Shipments for Products With its Kirin Chips — Yicai Global
Nvidia standardizes HBM production at TSMC — TechZine
Samsung Taps TSMC for Nvidia NVHBM Base Dies — Deccan Chronicle (Reuters)
DeepSeek open-sources inference framework with support for Nvidia and Huawei chips — TechNode
DeepInfer GitHub Repository — GitHub
Microsoft’s AI Coding Agent Testing Tool Has Been Open-Sourced — It’s FOSS
Electronic Arts Shut Down RPG Developer BioWare — Siliconera
EA Shuts Down BioWare, Early Development on the Next Mass Effect Is Ending — Esports.gg
Don’t Nod is in financial strife, opens safeguard proceedings — Shacknews
Life is Strange studio Don’t Nod faces uncertain future — GosuGamers