Afternoon edition — Wednesday 4 November 2026

Tencent released Hy4, the latest generation of its large language model, on Wednesday. It says Hy4 understands images for the first time and can operate command-line and graphical software, with special training on tools such as Blender and CAD. Tencent also reports gains in instruction following, long documents and long agent tasks.

The model is live in Tencent products including WorkBuddy, CodeBuddy and Yuanbao, through Tencent Cloud TokenHub and through third-party platforms such as OpenRouter. Pricing is unchanged from the earlier Hy4 Preview at about $0.90 per million input tokens and $2.70 per million output tokens. Tencent says it will publish model weights and system cards in the coming days.

Tencent's own figures include a cut in its internal hallucination rate from 12.95% for Hy4 Preview to 7.2%, and first place among open-source models in a blind test of 579 financial tasks with 213 finance professionals, scoring 3.04 against 2.97 for DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017.

OpenAI said on Wednesday that it will acquire Pierre Computer Company, the maker of Code Storage and a family of open-source developer tools. Pierre's Trees and Diffs libraries already power file browsing and change review in the Codex app.

Code Storage is a service that lets apps store code and track its history using Git. OpenAI said customers can keep using it after the deal closes while it brings its features into Codex, and that Pierre's open-source projects will stay open-source. Financial terms were not disclosed, and the deal still needs regulatory approval.

Axios, which first reported the deal, framed it as a challenge to Microsoft's GitHub as agents write more code; Microsoft owns nearly a quarter of OpenAI, Axios notes. Earlier this week OpenAI revealed Pando, a source-control backend that it says cut the time needed to push code changes by nearly 80%.

Voters in more than 30 localities across nine states backed moratoriums, outright bans and other limits on data centres in Tuesday's US midterm elections, Semafor reported. Edgewater, Florida voted to write a data-centre ban into its city charter, and voters in Perry, Ohio approved financial and operating conditions for hyperscale developers that seek tax breaks.

Counts differ by tracker, and every figure is unofficial. Tom's Hardware, citing the Data Centers on the Ballot tracker, said 33 measures restricting development had won, six more were leading, one measure in Harwood, North Dakota had failed and five had no posted results. Business Insider cited a Redbud Consulting count of 33 restricting measures approved against one allowing data centres, as of 8 a.m. Eastern time.

Business Insider also reported that NBC News' exit poll found 76% of voters would oppose a new data centre in their community. It quoted Goldman Sachs economists who said Democratic wins at state and local level would likely bring short-term moratoria potentially affecting about 45% of planned US data-centre capacity expansion.

Oracle has cancelled a chip-leasing contract with Tencent worth an estimated $7 billion after US officials raised concerns about it, the Financial Times reported on Wednesday, citing people familiar with the matter. Reuters said it could not immediately verify the report, and Oracle, Tencent and the White House did not respond to its requests for comment.

Under the five-year lease, first reported by the FT last month, Tencent was to rent capacity in Oracle data centres in Southeast Asia, giving it use of about 100,000 advanced AI chips that it cannot obtain in China. The FT also reported that officials from Guangdong, where Tencent is based, visited the company and asked it to support domestic Chinese chips.

Data-centre developer TeraWulf said on Wednesday that Google has signed credit support agreements for debt financing tied to about $19 billion of lease commitments from Anthropic at its Justified Data Campus in Hawesville, Kentucky. TeraWulf also signed a definitive construction contract with Fluor for three data-centre buildings there.

TeraWulf's filing with the US securities regulator says that if Anthropic defaults on rent or becomes insolvent, Google can take over the lease as tenant or, in some cases, pay a termination fee and take an equity stake in the TeraWulf subsidiary that owns the site. The backstop ends once Anthropic holds certain investment-grade credit ratings for at least three months.

The 20-year lease covers about 401 megawatts of critical IT load. TeraWulf expects phased delivery from late 2027 through the second quarter of 2028.

For almost two years, British ministers and agencies said AI could give the economy a £400 billion boost. WIRED reported on Wednesday that the UK's AI minister, Kanishka Narayan, said in a parliamentary answer last week that the figure came from a 2023 report commissioned by Google and produced by the consultancy Public First, now PF Global.

In the same answer, Narayan said AI adoption and data investment could add £55 billion to £140 billion to the UK economy by 2030, with a central estimate of £120 billion, and called even that 'hugely uncertain'. WIRED says ministers have had the lower estimate since at least November 2025, and the answer did not withdraw the £400 billion figure.

PF Global told WIRED the gap partly reflects slower AI adoption than its 2023 model assumed.