US pre-market trading saw a collective uptick in optical communication stocks, Neocloud shares, semiconductor stocks and storage stocks, with AAOI surging over 5%.

The Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA)’s trading holiday schedule shows that the U.S. cash bond market will be closed next Monday (October 12). October 12 is Columbus Day, a U.S. federal statutory holiday, though holiday observances vary across regions. For financial markets, U.S. stock markets will open as normal, and CME’s U.S. Treasury futures will also trade regularly, but the U.S. cash bond market will remain closed for the entire day. It should be noted that U.S. cash bonds and U.S. Treasury futures are distinct products: cash bonds refer to actual issued instruments such as U.S. Treasuries, corporate bonds, and commercial paper, while U.S. Treasury futures are standardized futures contracts with U.S. Treasuries as the underlying asset.

Beating AI News Insight: Spanish AI startup Speridlabs has tested a novel AI image generation method. Most current AI image models first generate content from compressed image data before reconstructing the final image, a process that can cause detail loss. Speridlabs sought to determine if skipping this step to generate pixels directly would deliver better results. The team trained an open-source model, Iris-3B, and adapted another existing model to generate pixels directly. They evaluated these models on tasks including low-resolution image restoration and judging object distance in photos, comparing their performance with existing approaches. The results did not show the expected consistent improvement; some metrics were even slightly worse. The direct pixel-generating models also exhibited minor grid artifacts in some test outputs. However, the research confirmed the feasibility of direct pixel generation. Iris-3B scored 0.540 in an image generation benchmark, nearly matching Qwen-Image’s 0.539. Simply removing the image compression step did not give it a clear edge in detail-intensive tasks.

According to an official announcement, Upbit will list KAIA trading pairs against KRW, BTC, and USDT.

According to HTX market data, FOLD surged over 17% in a short period due to its listing on Upbit, and is currently trading at $0.044. Earlier news indicated that Upbit will launch KAIA trading pairs against KRW, BTC, and USDT.

According to market data from BIT (bit.com), crypto-related stocks are broadly rising in US pre-market trading. CEA Industries (BNC) gained 3.14%, Strategy (MSTR) rose 2.58%, Coinbase (COIN) climbed 2.45%, BitMine (BMNR) advanced 2.04%, Circle (CRCL) was up 1.94%, MARA increased 1.90%, and Robinhood (HOOD) gained 1.86%.

Beating AI News Flash: According to Bloomberg, Nvidia-backed data center firm Firmus Grid is exploring a private placement to raise between $2 billion and $3 billion after withdrawing its Australian IPO application. People familiar with the matter said the company and its advisors are in discussions with existing investors. The financing structure has not been finalized and may include both equity and debt, while the final amount could also be adjusted. It remains unclear whether Nvidia will participate. Firmus pulled its listing application from the Australian Securities Exchange on Friday, noting it would consider alternative financing routes. The company had originally planned to raise around $5 billion via an IPO, which would have given it a valuation of roughly $30 billion. Existing investors were set to contribute approximately half of the IPO’s fundraising target, a factor that could help the company move faster on its new financing round. Firmus requires continuous capital to advance its planned data center projects. It previously secured a total of $2 billion in capital commitments from investors including Nvidia and Blackstone; other shareholders include Jane Street. In April this year, it also closed a $505 million funding round led by Coatue. People familiar with the matter added that Firmus still intends to explore a U.S. listing in the long run. Firmus declined to comment on the ongoing financing discussions.