June’s AI headlines shifted from supply‑chain events to blockbuster investments and power‑hungry scale‑ups. Meta made waves with a $14.3B move for 49 % of Scale AI, recruiting CEO Alexandr Wang to lead a new AGI unit within Meta, while OpenAI struck a landmark compute pact with Google Cloud, cut o3 prices 80 %, and locked in a $200M Department of Defense contract. Elon Musk’s xAI pursued a $300M secondary at a soaring $113B valuation to fund Grok’s super‑compute build‑out.
VC and growth investors kept pace, deploying $9.2B across 176 financings—both six‑month highs. Flagship rounds included a16z‑backed Thinking Machines ($2B seed), Anysphere’s $900M growth deal, and a $600M Series F for Applied Intuition, alongside sizable cheques for Cohere, Harvey, Abridge, and Glean.
Infrastructure and monetization themes intensified. Cloudflare launched “Pay Per Crawl” as Reddit and the NY Times had previously doubled down on paid licensing, SoftBank floated a $1T AI‑and‑robotics hub in Arizona, and Amazon pledged $20B for two Pennsylvania data‑center complexes—underscoring the swelling capital race to secure AI platform dominance.
Stepmark Partners 