July’s headline deals underscored an aggressive land-grab for talent, compute, and vertical integration. Google licensed Windsurf’s AI-coding technology and key staff, Meta unveiled its new Superintelligence Labs and long-range “Prometheus” cluster, Elon Musk’s xAI secured fresh capital to scale Grok and its Colossus supercomputer, and CoreWeave bought Core Scientific to lock in additional power capacity while reducing future lease exposure.
Venture momentum remained strong: roughly $15 billion flowed into nearly 150 financings during the month, led by two multibillion-dollar rounds for xAI and Anthropic and nine-figure checks for Mistral, Groq, and several infrastructure and healthcare-AI upstarts. Although activity dipped from June’s peak, deal volume is still tracking close to record territory.
These investments are already rippling through the majors. Cloud divisions at Microsoft and Alphabet posted robust double-digit growth, Apple highlighted AI-driven product tailwinds, and Amazon reported solid gains at AWS alongside broader retail strength. Taken together, the capital, compute build-outs, and early operating results signal an industry entering a new phase of scaled execution rather than speculative promise.
Stepmark Partners 