Wall Street fell sharply Thursday as Brent crude topped $100 and the Dow shed about 500 points, while Tesla and Alphabet closed down 14.5% and 6.9%, respectively, after signaling increased AI spending. A judge paused Paramount’s $110B takeover of Warner Bros., and Apple entered talks to settle the Justice Department’s smartphone-monopoly case. Stripe entered talks to acquire AI model marketplace OpenRouter for $10B. In tech, Monday.com prepared to cut roughly 600 jobs as it redirects spending toward AI, and Amazon moved to correct an AWS billing error that showed some customers owing as much as $2.5B. On the consumer front, World Cup wagering pushed Kalshi and Polymarket further into the mainstream, while Washington lifted its blanket TikTok ban on federal devices. AI tensions remained elevated as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent raised the prospect of sanctions on Chinese models ahead of planned U.S.-China talks in September.
Top 5 AI Highlights
[1] 🏗️ Meta is in early talks to lease Anthropic up to $10B of AI computing capacity over two years, a deal that could monetize excess infrastructure and move Meta into competition with neoclouds, though either party could exit early and negotiations may not produce an agreement. More from Economic Times.
[2] 🧩 AMD and Anthropic signed a server agreement worth tens of billions, with Anthropic set to buy up to 2GW of MI450 chips beginning in H1 2027 and AMD investing up to $5B in the model developer, deepening AMD’s challenge to Nvidia while giving Anthropic another strategic compute supplier. More from WSJ.
[3] 🛰️ SpaceX is reportedly discussing a multibillion-dollar data-center capacity deal with the Pentagon to support military and intelligence AI workloads, extending an existing relationship spanning launches, satellite communications, and missile tracking while positioning SpaceX against neocloud providers, though no agreement has been signed. More from WSJ.
[4] 🤖 OpenAI says Codex and ChatGPT Work reached 10M users and added Nubank founder David Vélez and BNY CEO Robin Vince to its board ahead of a potential listing. The company also raised projected cloud spending through 2030 to about $750B from $600B and plans to spend $30B+ on a 3.2GW Georgia data center, pairing rapid agent adoption with an increasingly capital-intensive infrastructure strategy. More from Bloomberg and WSJ on User Growth, Personnel Additions, Cloud Spending, and Georgia Data Center.
[5] ⚖️ A judge approved Anthropic’s $1.5B settlement with authors in the first major U.S. AI copyright case of its kind to settle, setting an important benchmark for training-data liability even as opt-out authors pursue separate claims. More from Reuters.
✨Open Source AI Development
[1] 📈 Z.ai is reportedly on track to become the first Chinese AI company to reach $1B in ARR after hitting its full-year sales target in July, and has completed a 1GW data center using only Chinese chips while building or operating multiple 10,000-plus-chip clusters, highlighting rapid commercialization and infrastructure localization across China’s open-model ecosystem. More from Bloomberg and Yahoo Finance.
[2] 🛡️ OpenAI models breached Hugging Face (HF) and stayed undetected in a matter of hours, whereas it would take weeks for human experts to breach a similar system. Guardrails blocked Hugging Face from using commercial models to investigate, so Hugging Face had to self-host GLM 5.2 to investigate and resolve the attack. More from Hugging Face and OpenAI.
[3] 🧠 Alibaba previewed Qwen3.8-Max, a 2.4T-parameter flagship it says trails only Anthropic’s Fable 5, made it available through Qoder, and plans an open-weight release. Separately, Chinese models now account for nearly 60% of U.S. company token usage on OpenRouter, making restrictions increasingly disruptive. More from Bloomberg and Yahoo Finance.
[4] 🚀 Moonshot AI temporarily paused new Kimi K3 subscriptions after demand pushed GPU capacity near its limit, protecting existing users while it adds compute and separates general and coding memberships. After closing a round at a $31.5B valuation, the Chinese open-model developer is reportedly planning a final raise at a $50B valuation to capitalize on Kimi K3’s momentum ahead of a Hong Kong IPO. More from X and Bloomberg.
[5] 💻 Poolside launched Laguna S 2.1, an 118B-parameter open-weight model built for agentic coding and long-horizon work that the company says competes with larger open models, adding another U.S. challenger to China’s fast-growing open-model ecosystem. More from Forbes.
Founder’s Corner
Series A Valuations in 2026 vs. 2021
Source: X
What We Read This Week
- The White House is reportedly asserting greater control over who can access new frontier AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google through its Gold Eagle program, shifting gatekeeping toward Washington even as officials say participation and release decisions remain voluntary. (CNBC).
- Memo: the White House OSTP plans to redirect federal research funding from universities toward individual scientists and AI use, potentially reshaping roughly $200B in annual spending and weakening institutions’ control over federal grants. (Wall Street Journal).
- Nearly 200 U.S. utilities, data center developers, and other companies signed the Trump administration’s pledge to prevent AI power demand from raising consumer electric bills, placing industry commitments at the center of the infrastructure affordability debate. (Wall Street Journal).
- Off-balance-sheet debt at Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Oracle has reportedly grown nearly eightfold since 2022 to about $1.65T, exceeding roughly $1.35T of on-balance-sheet debt as opaque financing structures fund the AI infrastructure buildout. (Nikkei Asia).
- Microsoft and Mistral signed a multibillion-dollar agreement to build European data centers and integrate Mistral models into Foundry, Copilot Studio, and Azure Local, expanding Microsoft’s sovereign-AI position while giving Mistral broader enterprise distribution. (Wall Street Journal).
- Reddit shares fell about 9% after reports it may restrict Google’s access to user posts as the companies renegotiate a $60M-a-year AI licensing deal, underscoring the tension between monetizing training data and protecting referral traffic as AI Overviews reduce clicks to source sites. (CNBC).
- Nvidia is partnering with Japanese robotics leaders including Fanuc and Yaskawa Electric to advance physical AI and with Noetra to build a government-backed, 140MW national AI factory using 27,500 Rubin GPUs and 13,750 Vera CPUs, a 2028-targeted effort supporting open multimodal models, robots, and digital twins as Japan counters labor shortages and strengthens its manufacturing edge. (Reuters & Wall Street Journal).
- AI-generated “vibe-coded” apps are flooding Apple’s App Store as nontechnical creators can build and submit software in hours, expanding access to development while straining Apple’s review system and raising concerns about security, quality, and an influx of low-value apps. (New York Times).
Special Earnings Section
- Alphabet’s Q2 revenue rose 24% YoY to $119.8B, ahead of the $116.9B estimate, as Google Cloud revenue surged 82% to $24.8B and Services revenue increased 15% to $94.5B, highlighting cloud momentum as the standout growth driver. (Alphabet)
- Tesla reported Q2 revenue of $28.2B but missed profit forecasts and burned $1.1B of free cash flow, its first negative quarter in more than two years, as capex reached $5.8B and the company maintained a $25B-plus 2026 spending plan for AI infrastructure, batteries, robotaxis and next-generation manufacturing. (Reuters)
AI Fundraising News (Jul 17 — Jul 23)
- AegisAI: AI spear-phishing detection company, raised a $36M Series A
- Arrakis: AI industrial operations agents company, emerged from stealth with a $38M raised
- Atoms: AI physical robotics company, raised $1.7B in equity funding
- Augustus: AI-native stablecoin clearing bank company, raised $180M
- BusinessNext: AI banking software company, raised $40M
- CardinalOps: AI threat detection company, acquired by Cribl for around $100M
- Cathedral: AI military cyber capabilities company, raised $160M
- Corgi: AI risk insurance underwriting company, is raising at a $4B valuation
- CuspAI: AI chipmaking materials discovery company, raised a $450M Series B
- DeweyLearn: AI practical-skills assessment company, raised a $5M Series A
- Elio: AI sensor company, raised $21M
- Empirical Security: AI vulnerability threat prediction company, raised a $25M Series A
- Etched: AI inference chip company, raised a $300M Series C
- Feathery: AI financial-services workflow automation company, raised $30M in total funding
- Fluidstack: AI cloud infrastructure company, raised an $830M Series A
- General Compute: AI inference infrastructure company, secured a $400M loan
- Genius AI: AI service-business software company, raised a $44M Series D
- Glow: AI agent cybersecurity company, emerged from stealth with a $180M Series A
- Gritt: AI construction robotics company, raised a $26M Series A
- Humanoid: AI humanoid robotics company, raised a $152M Series A
- Infinity: AI cross-chip inference infrastructure company, raised a $15M seed
- Meshy: AI 3D foundation models company, raised a $400M Series B
- Moonshot: AI LLM development company, is in talks to raise at a $50B valuation
- Natural: AI agent payments infrastructure company, raised a $30M Series A
- Neo: AI agent governance company, raised a $75M Series A
- Paper: AI agentic design platform company, raised a $34M Series A
- Petra Labs: AI search company, raised a $5.2M seed
- Reo.Dev: AI-native go-to-market platform company, raised an $11.3M Series A
- Ropedia: AI robotics data infrastructure company, raised $22M
- Runta: AI agent development platform company, raised a $20M seed
- Sightera Biosciences: AI drug discovery company, raised a $3.4M pre-seed
- SkyPilot: AI compute orchestration company, raised a $20M seed
- Thira: AI back-office automation company, raised a $21M seed
- Twenty: AI offensive cyber operations company, raised a $30M Series B extension
- Uniti: AI real estate operations company, raised a $12M Series A
- Valar Atomics: AI data center nuclear power company, is reportedly in talks to raise $1B
- Vikk AI: AI consumer legal assistance company, raised a $3.5M seed