U.S. markets opened the week with May CPI rising 0.5% month over month and 4.2% year over year, a three-year high, with energy prices up 3.9%, core CPI up 0.2%, and the Fed’s next rate decision set for June 17. In Tech, SpaceX raised $75 billion in a record U.S. IPO by selling 555.56 million shares at $135, valuing Elon Musk’s company at roughly $1.77 trillion ahead of its expected Nasdaq debut under SPCX. Jeff Bezos’ AI startup Prometheus raised $12 billion at a $41 billion valuation to build “artificial engineer” tools for physical product design, manufacturing, and drug development. Also in tech financing, Amazon secured a $17.5B delayed-draw term loan led by Citigroup. In AI, Google is backstopping lease payments that support roughly $35 billion of financing for five third-party-developed U.S. data centers where Anthropic will access Google TPUs through Fluidstack. Elsewhere in AI, CoreWeave insiders have sold $2.3B+ in stock since its March 2025 IPO. EU regulators ordered Meta to restore rival AI chatbots’ free WhatsApp Business API access within five working days, with potential fines of up to 10% of global turnover. A Reuters/Ipsos poll found 53% of Americans fear AI-related job loss in their household. Finally, the World Cup returns to North America on Thursday for the first time since 1994. Team USA’s first game is today at 6 pm PT vs. Paraguay. Access the full schedule for the World Cup here.
We’ve published our Monthly AI Deck for May 2026. Check it out here.
Top 5 AI Highlights
[1] 📈 OpenAI has confidentially filed IPO paperwork with the SEC, positioning the ChatGPT maker for a potential listing as soon as this fall, while signaling timing may take “a while” as it weighs private-company flexibility against public-market demand for AI leaders amid IPO competition from SpaceX and Anthropic. More from WSJ.
[2] 🛡️ Anthropic launched Claude Fable 5, the first public version of its powerful Mythos model, giving users API and enterprise access with strict safety limits, 30-day traffic retention, and premium pricing at $10 per 1M input tokens / $50 per 1M output tokens, underscoring the market tradeoff between frontier AI performance, safety controls, and rising enterprise AI costs. More from Anthropic.
[3] 💸 An AI price war is intensifying as enterprises route routine workloads to cheaper open-source and Chinese models, cutting some costs by up to 95% and pressuring OpenAI and Anthropic to reduce prices despite multibillion-dollar losses and looming IPO ambitions, raising the risk that frontier models become increasingly commoditized. More from WSJ.
[4] ☁️ Google agreed to pay SpaceX $920M per month for computing power from October 2026 through June 2029, a roughly $30B cloud services deal that deepens Alphabet’s AI infrastructure push and signals SpaceX’s growing role as a major compute supplier. More from TechCrunch.
[5] 🍎 Apple used WWDC 2026 to relaunch its delayed AI strategy, unveiling Siri AI built with Google, deeper Apple Intelligence features across iPhone, iPad, Watch and Vision Pro, iOS 27 upgrades including Camera object recognition, and Liquid Glass refinements, reinforcing Apple’s push to close the AI gap and protect its premium ecosystem. More from The Verge.
✨Open Source AI Development
[1] 🌙 Moonshot AI is seeking to raise $1B–$2B at a potential $30B valuation, 50% above its $20B May round and more than 6x its 2025 year-end valuation, as investor demand for China’s Kimi chatbot maker and domestic AI champions intensifies. More from SCMP.
[2] ⚡ Xiaomi’s MiMo-V2.5-Pro-UltraSpeed reportedly hit over 1,000 tokens per second and peaked near 1,200 on a 1T-parameter model using a standard 8-GPU commodity node, far above GPT-5.5 at 68, Claude Opus 4.6 at ~71 and Gemini Flash at 192, positioning China’s phone maker as an unexpected AI inference-speed contender with a June 9–23 API trial priced at 3x standard MiMo rates for roughly 10x generation speed. More from Decrypt.
[3] 🖥️ Google introduced DiffusionGemma, an open 26B Mixture-of-Experts text-diffusion model that activates 3.8B parameters and delivers up to 4x faster local inference, exceeding 1,000 tokens per second on an NVIDIA H100 while fitting within 18GB of VRAM when quantized, potentially enabling lower-latency interactive AI applications despite lower output quality than standard Gemma 4. More from Google.
[4] ⚙️ Cohere launched North Mini Code, an Apache 2.0 open-source 30B Mixture-of-Experts coding model with just 3B active parameters, scoring 33.4 on Artificial Analysis’ Coding Index and surpassing several much larger open models, strengthening Cohere’s position in enterprise coding agents while highlighting the efficiency gains of specialized sparse architectures. More from Hugging Face.
[5] 🎥 Hugging Face and Pollen Robotics detailed Reachy Mini’s open-source media stack, using GStreamer and WebRTC to unify local and remote audio, video, and robot control across Lite and Wireless models, with 1080p/60fps streaming and roughly 100 ms end-to-end latency, strengthening the platform’s appeal for low-latency AI robotics applications running on-device, in browsers, or on GPU-backed Spaces. More from Hugging Face.
Founder’s Corner
Early Stage Ecosystem Ranking by Geography and Industry
Source: X
What We Read This Week
- OpenAI is planning ChatGPT’s biggest overhaul since launch, repositioning the $850B startup’s nearly 1B-user chatbot as a “superapp” for agents, coding and partner apps, as it pushes higher-margin business revenue ahead of a potential IPO, with enterprises already driving ~40% of revenue and expected to reach 50% by year-end. (Financial Times)
- OpenAI expects to go public within the next year after filing IPO paperwork, with timing shaped by its massive compute funding needs and progress toward self-improving AI, while a tender at $687.69 per share and the planned June launch of its “meaningfully improved” GPT-5.6 model could reinforce investor interest around a potential $1 trillion valuation. (The Information)
- Perplexity plans to IPO in 2028 regardless of Anthropic’s and OpenAI’s listings, while Perplexity pushes cost-aware AI routing that may use open-source models when they deliver 90% of the task at 10x–20x lower cost. (CNBC)
- CFOs are racing to manage AI token costs as vendors shift from flat software fees to usage-based pricing, with KPMG finding only 26% of companies have full AI-cost visibility, 50% have partial visibility, and 22% have little to none before billing, while some firms have blown annual token budgets in months and one saw usage jump 6x. (WSJ)
- Nvidia and SK Hynix signed a multi-year AI-chip partnership covering next-gen memory design and manufacturing, strengthening SK Hynix’s HBM4 position for Nvidia’s Vera Rubin platform, which is in full production with Q3 deliveries planned, even as SK Hynix shares fell 10% amid a broader Asian tech selloff. (Bloomberg)
- Situational Awareness, the AI-focused hedge fund founded by 24-year-old Leopold Aschenbrenner less than two years ago, has surged to over $20B in AUM after gaining ~270% after fees through May 2026 and more than 1,000% since inception, with Jane Street among investors and Anthropic now about one-fifth of assets after its valuation jumped from $61.5B in February 2025 to $965B. (WSJ).
- Cursor has reached $4B in annualized revenue, up from $3B in late April and $2B in February, with 75% of run rate from enterprise customers and enterprise revenue growing 3x in Q1 versus Q4 2025, strengthening its AI-coding momentum ahead of a reported SpaceX acquisition tied to Musk’s IPO plans. (Forbes).
- China is preparing a 2T yuan ($295B) five-year plan to build a nationwide AI data-center network, funded mainly through sovereign debt and state funds, with state firms like China Mobile and China Telecom operating much of the buildout, local suppliers such as Huawei targeted for at least 80% of tech, and broader power-grid integration potentially lifting total investment to at least 5T yuan. (Bloomberg).
- Intel may be regaining strategic relevance in advanced AI chip manufacturing as Google reportedly orders 3M+ TPUs for 2028 and Nvidia tests Intel’s EMIB packaging and 18A process for its 2028 Feynman GPUs, with TSMC capacity constraints pushing major chip designers to seek backup suppliers and potentially improving Intel Foundry’s turnaround prospects. (The Information)
- S&P Dow Jones Indices rejected SpaceX’s push for accelerated S&P 500 entry, preserving rules on seasoning, public float, and profitability, a decision that blocks potential passive-fund buying of roughly $14B for SpaceX, $8B for OpenAI, and $4.6B for Anthropic while limiting index exposure to speculative AI infrastructure risk. (Ars Technica)
AI Fundraising News (Jun 5 — Jun 11)
- A Security: AI offensive cybersecurity company, raised $37M
- Alta Ares: AI air defense systems company, raised a €50M Series A
- Beacon Software: AI software rollup company, raised a $225M Series C
- BeatpulseLabs: AI multimodal training data company, raised a $1.8M pre-seed
- Billables AI: AI legal time-tracking company, raised a $10.2M Series A
- CameraMatics: AI fleet safety company, raised €49M
- Capsa AI: AI private capital data platform company, raised an $18M Series A
- Concentrate AI: AI model routing and cost-control company, raised a $5M pre-seed
- Coram AI: AI security incident detection company, raised a $35M Series B
- Cyera: AI data security company, raised $600M
- Dapple: AI enterprise infrastructure company, raised a $30M seed
- Equal AI: AI call-screening assistant company, raised a $30M Series B
- Genspark: AI agentic workplace company, raised a $100M Series B extension
- Infinity Constellation: AI professional services software company, raised a $24M Series A
- Innefu Labs: AI defense and intelligence software company, raised a $30M Series B
- Jedify: AI enterprise context graph company, raised a $24M Series A
- Kyber: AI autonomous systems control company, raised a $5M seed
- Maneva: AI factory safety monitoring company, raised a $27M Series A
- Mendo: AI enterprise adoption platform company, raised a $13.8M Series A
- Neura Robotics: AI humanoid robotics company, raised $1.4B
- Niteshift: AI coding agent infrastructure company, raised a $7M seed
- Odessia Travel: AI conversational travel booking company, raised $6M
- Opal Security: AI identity access governance company, raised $23M
- Orbital: AI inference satellite company, raised a $5M pre-seed
- PhoenixAI: AI analytical database company, raised an $80M Series B
- PhysicsX: AI industrial design company, raised a $300M Series C
- Pi: AI vulnerability prioritization company, raised $35M
- Poetic: AI financial compliance automation company, raised $50M
- PointFive: AI cloud cost optimization company, raised a $60M Series B
- Prometheus: AI physical task models company, raised a $12B Series B
- RELAI: AI agent performance improvement company, raised a $5.4M pre-seed
- Standard Bots: AI robotic arms company, raised $200M
- Stepful: AI healthcare training company, raised a $55M Series C
- TensorWave: AI cloud infrastructure company, raised a $350M Series B
- Theker: AI industrial robotics company, raised $85M
- Upriver: AI enterprise data quality company, raised a $14M seed
- Willow: AI agent identity governance company, raised a $7M seed
- Zaro: AI enterprise workspace company, raised a $5.1M pre-seed