Latest updates from the world of artificial intelligence
The Melbourne ambient-scribe company took $100M in a Blackbird-led Series C plus $240M of growth capital from General Catalyst, on the back of a 62% enterprise activation rate and a sole-supplier win at NHS England Midlands.
SiliconANGLE
Read more →The benchmarking startup Vals closed a $40 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, on a simple premise: publish your test and labs will train against it. Vals keeps its questions confidential and scores models on real work in law, finance, coding and biosecurity. The labs being graded are also the ones paying.
TechCrunch
Read more →The company that built OpenAI’s Abilene campus closed an oversubscribed Series F at a $30.9 billion post-money valuation, roughly matching the figure it was reported to be chasing in July. It claims more than $140 billion of contracted value and 6+ GW of contracted capacity, of which 1 GW is live.
Crusoe / GlobeNewswire
Read more →The Danish drugmaker will test Anthropic’s science workbench inside selected R&D workflows and run Claude behind its software engineering. No money, no molecules and no milestones were disclosed — and it is the second frontier lab Novo has signed this year.
Novo / GlobeNewswire
Read more →Anthropic has signed its first Australian data-centre lease, taking the opening stage of a A$32 billion campus on the Darling Downs. It will not own or build the site, it will serve Claude from it rather than train there — and at full size the park would lift Queensland's daily electricity use by about a quarter.
ABC News
Read more →A Sydney bitcoin miner turned AI data centre builder is on a global roadshow for what would be the second-largest IPO in Australian history. OpenAI has already signed for two of its Malaysian sites; no prospectus has been filed yet.
ABC News
Read more →Anthropic’s Opus 5 is now available to engineers across Google, but only inside Antigravity, the company’s internal build of its development platform. Access had been limited to parts of DeepMind and a handful of high-priority projects. Gemini stays the primary model, and Claude arrives on a per-user quota.
Business Insider
Read more →Microsoft published a draft code of conduct for its in-house models that requires them never to resist correction or shutdown, to communicate understandably, and to treat any breach of the code as a failure. Mustafa Suleyman calls it a constitution of sorts. It also states flatly that the AI is not conscious and deserves no rights.
The Globe and Mail
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The Reno chipmaker closed $875 million across two tranches at a $5 billion post-money valuation, betting that commodity phone memory beats HBM for inference. Its next chip, Asimov, carries up to 2,304 GB and does not tape out until the end of the year.
PR Newswire
Read more →The RLHF co-inventor who founded the Alignment Research Center joins the committee that governs safety and security across all of OpenAI — and becomes a non-voting observer on the for-profit board.
OpenAI
Read more →Samsung led a €3 billion Series D that values the Paris lab above €21 billion — the largest equity round a European tech company has ever closed — and most of the money goes into data centres Mistral will own outright.
Euronews
Read more →Anthropic has signed $517 billion of compute contracts and locked in 14.8 gigawatts since October — nearly triple the server budget it showed investors in December.
The Information
Read more →Nvidia is paying nearly $13 billion for the open-model hub that 18 million developers use — its second-largest acquisition ever, and a bet that owning the open ecosystem is worth as much as selling the silicon underneath it.
NVIDIA
Read more →Two founders aged 22 and 23 took an AI training-data startup from a $300M Series A to a $3.2B valuation in five months — the quickest launch-to-unicorn run in Y Combinator’s history.
TechCrunch
Read more →DeepSeek is signing a 50 billion yuan round at a $74 billion pre-money valuation, roughly 43% above its last round two months ago, ahead of a possible 2027 STAR Market listing.
Tech Startups
Read more →The startup left stealth with a seed round led by Accel and an index of more than 100 billion documents, built on the premise that an agent searches the web nothing like a person does.
TechCrunch
Read more →IDG Capital led the first outside round for XPeng’s robotics arm, with Tencent and Alibaba joining. The money funds mass production of the IRON humanoid, due to start by the end of 2026.
XPENG
Read more →Business Insider reports the open-source model hub has been talking to banks about bids that would value it at $13 billion or more — nearly triple its 2023 mark. No bidder is named, no deal is signed, and the CEO has spent years saying the community comes before the exit.
TechCrunch
Read more →Anthropic has filed confidentially and could go public within weeks, aiming to match or beat the $86.2 billion SpaceX raised in June — which would make it the largest first-time share sale on record.
The Next Web
Read more →The inference-chip startup raised $700M at a $21 billion valuation, double its July price. The lead investor ran an Etched cluster in its own datacenter first — which is more than most repriced chip startups can say.
TechCrunch
Read more →Marvell handed Google a warrant for almost 59 million shares at $206.58, exercisable to 2033 — but only about 1.4 million vest up front. The rest unlock in tranches tied to every $500 million of custom silicon Google buys, a schedule that only fully converts at roughly $120 billion of chips. Broadcom, Google's sole custom-chip partner since 2015, fell more than 5% on the news.
Bloomberg
Read more →The UK inference-chip startup is raising ~$600M at a $6.5B valuation — 6× its May price — on the strength of a signed Anthropic contract for silicon that will not ship until 2027.
Bloomberg
Read more →The Chinese humanoid maker priced at 150.80 yuan and opened at 1,100 — a 629% pop, a $66B market cap and 8,000× subscription demand, on a day the rest of the STAR Market fell 6%.
South China Morning Post
Read more →The Financial Times reported that OpenAI dissolved its centralized Preparedness team at the end of July. OpenAI says it did no such thing — but does not dispute that the work now sits with other groups.
Engadget
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