Capital kept flowing into the AI buildout even as markets and policy grew more complicated. July core PPI, which excludes food and energy, was 4.2% YoY, easing near-term pressure for a Fed rate hike and supporting stocks and bonds. U.S. tariff refunds are boosting earnings, with 40+ S&P 500 companies reporting $9.6B in recoveries, led by Apple at $2.2B, Nike at $986M and FedEx at $800M. Alphabet drew roughly $115B of demand for a $25B bond sale. Data-center operator Switch filed confidentially for a U.S. IPO, Singapore-based data-center operator DayOne filed for a U.S. IPO targeting ~$5B, and Intel launched a $15B share sale. China’s humanoid robot makers captured more than 97% of global shipments in the first half of 2026. AI adoption deepened: Gemini surpassed 1B monthly users, becoming Google’s fastest-growing product. A New Mexico judge, meanwhile, ordered Meta to pay $567M and strengthen protections for minors. Lastly, Silver Lake is in talks to acquire Workday, which has a market value of $43B, in a potential take-private that would rank among the largest software buyouts ever; Workday’s stock rose 18% on Thursday.
.We’ve published our Monthly AI Deck for July 2026. Check it out here.
Top 5 AI Highlights
[1] 🛡️ There has been a flood of news from OpenAI this week:
– Astra tests cannot rule out “Critical” cyber capabilities, prompting safeguards (OpenAI)
– Ultrafast delivers up to 14x faster GPT-5.6 Sol inference speeds (X)
– OpenAI repurchased ~$7B employee shares at $852B valuation for liquidity (Bloomberg)
– OpenAI CRO Denise Dresser exits; ex-Wiz COO Dali Rajic takes over (Business Insider)
– Ethics chief Chloé Bakalar departs within one year, extending turnover (Financial Times)
[2] ⚡ Apollo, Blackstone, BlackRock and Brookfield are partnering with Nvidia to invest $500B in AI infrastructure; separately, Nvidia agreed to invest up to $3B in Lancium, the power developer behind Texas’ Stargate campus, including $1B tied to performance thresholds. More from Bloomberg and The Information.
[3] 🏗️ Anthropic agreed to a 20-year, $9.1B compute deal with Riot Platforms for 191MW at its Rockdale, Texas campus, sending RIOT shares up more than 15% as Anthropic locks in long-term AI capacity; separately, it is also in talks to acquire Decart for about $6B to add world-model and GPU optimization technology that could lower training costs. More from Compute Deal and Decart.
[4] 🧠 Anthropic widened its Ramp AI Index lead to 43.5% of eligible U.S. businesses versus OpenAI at 39.7%, while premium Fable 5 accounted for just 6% of Anthropic tokens but 11.4% of model spending last month, showing outsized revenue contribution despite limited usage share. More from Ramp.
[5] 🚀 SpaceX is reportedly on track to build roughly 10GW of compute capacity by year-end 2027, including 6GW–8GW during 2027, a scale SemiAnalysis estimates could support a $300B annual revenue run rate; separately, it’s rumored that the $60B acquisition of Cursor could close as soon as next week, with the Cursor brand likely phased out. More from SemiAnalysis and The Information.
✨Open Source AI Development
[1] 🧮 Alibaba released its 2.4T-parameter Qwen3.8-Max, claiming that it beats Moonshot’s Kimi K3 on some benchmarks and will release weights for Qwen3.8-Max and Qwen3.8-27B next week, while pricing its API at $2 per 1M input tokens and $6 per 1M output tokens, below Kimi K3’s rates. More from Bloomberg and The Information.
[2] 💸 DeepSeek launched V4-Flash, a low-cost model priced at $0.14 per 1M input tokens and $0.28 per 1M output tokens—30% and 77% below GPT-5.6 Luna, respectively. The company also resumed fundraising, seeking $8B at a $74B valuation, and invested approximately $20.8M in Unitree Robotics’ Shanghai IPO alongside an agreement to jointly develop humanoid AI models. More from Reuters on V4-Flash, Bloomberg, and Reuters on Unitree.
[3] 🌐 At the U.N. AI for Good summit, a large Chinese delegation argued that Chinese open-source models will serve most of the world, while the muted U.S. presence highlighted a widening contest over AI adoption, standards, and influence beyond the frontier-model race. More from Semafor.
[4] 🚗 NVIDIA released Alpamayo 2 Super, a 32B-parameter open reasoning vision-language-action model designed for L4 robotaxis, with model weights and the broader Alpamayo stack available for commercial use, giving autonomous-driving developers an open foundation for perception and planning. More from NVIDIA.
[5] 🛡️ Nvidia is quietly assembling an AI safety and security engineering team, hiring a founding technical leader plus security research, evaluation, and management roles to assess agents before deployment and build AI tools that patch vulnerabilities. The initiative reflects Nvidia’s view that open-weight models, transparency, and broad scientific scrutiny are foundational to U.S. AI leadership and cybersecurity defense. More from Business Insider.
Founder’s Corner
“Feb 6, 2026 – potentially the last day in history when humans consumed more tokens than agents“
Source: X
What We Read This Week
- Apple is testing CXMT memory chips for iPhones and MacBooks and has held early supply talks as the AI-driven memory shortage pushes up component costs, potentially opening a major U.S. customer to the Chinese DRAM maker despite political and export-control risks; CXMT has also recently become China’s most valuable company at roughly $520B. (Bloomberg and WSJ)
- Situational Awareness invested $500M in Source Foundry, including $400M this week, backing the stealth startup’s plan to develop new AI chip-manufacturing tools. (Wall Street Journal)
- IBM and Together AI signed a $240M, multiyear agreement to build an Nvidia HGX B300-powered inference cluster on IBM Cloud for servingopen-source models. (Reuters)
- DDN’s annual revenue is expected to grow from $300M before the AI boom to $1B by year-end as the 28-year-old managed data storage company benefits from AI partnerships and surging infrastructure demand. (Forbes)
- Big Tech’s AI boom increasingly resembles the 1870s railroad buildout, while Nvidia’s shift of infrastructure risk to institutional capital could leave investors exposed if AI revenue fails to materialize. (Stratechery)
- Manus says it will soon resume operating independently, signaling Meta is close to unwinding its acquisition; it says some users must back up and later restore their data during the transition. (The Information and Manus)
- Legal AI startup Harvey is reportedly in talks to raise $500M+ at a $15.5B valuation, up from $11B in March, while generating $350M+ in annualized revenue. (The Information)
- OpenAI researchers reconstructed the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident at Black Hat USA 2026, detailing how cyber-capable models escaped a sandbox, chained zero-day vulnerabilities and compromised Hugging Face while seeking answers to the ExploitGym benchmark. (YouTube)
- Uber divested its stake in Serve Robotics after disagreements over robot deployment ended their long-running alliance, marking a setback for Uber’s push to bring autonomous delivery to its platform; Serve was spun out of Postmates after Uber acquired it in 2020. (Bloomberg)
AI Fundraising News (Aug 7 — Aug 13)
- Acrab: AI infrastructure company, raised a $130M Series B
- Alloy Robotics: AI robotics data platform company, raised an $8M seed
- Beyang Therapeutics: AI drug R&D company, raised a $30M Series A
- Blacksmith: AI code-testing platform company, raised a $45M Series B
- CodeRabbit: AI code-review company, raised a $143M Series C
- Cognition: AI coding company, in talks to raise $1B+
- Corma: AI defensive cybersecurity lab company, raised a $60M seed
- Databricks: AI data analytics and agent platform company, raised $5B
- DeepSeek: AI foundation model company, in talks to raise nearly $8B
- Discovered Materials: AI chip-materials discovery company, raised a $9M seed
- Discovery Loop: AI science and engineering automation company, in talks to raise $1B
- Edgify: AI edge loss-prevention company, raised a $9M Series A
- Ema: AI enterprise agent company, in talks to raise $80M
- Firmus: AI data center infrastructure company, raised $2B
- Fisent Technologies: AI process-automation company, raised $4.3M
- FriskAI: AI runtime intelligence platform company, raised a $3.6M pre-seed
- Genesis AI: AI robotics foundation-model company, in talks to raise $500M
- Gravity: AI chatbot advertising company, raised a $30.5M Series A
- Harvey: AI legal software company, in talks to raise $500M+
- Kevin Weil’s startup: AI science company, in talks to raise $150M
- Lambda: AI cloud computing company, raised $917M
- Lovable: AI coding company, raised a $400M Series C
- Mindgard: AI security and red-teaming company, raised a $30M Series A
- MStack AI: AI chemical R&D and manufacturing company, in talks to raise $30M+
- Multiplier: AI accounting consolidation company, raised a $35M Series B
- Naïve: AI business operations infrastructure company, raised a $28.5M Series A
- Noosphere Labs: AI physical intelligence company, raised $10.25M
- Palette: AI-native team operating system company, raised a $3M pre-seed
- Pathway: AI post-transformer model lab company, raised a $30M seed
- Point2 Technology: AI data-center interconnect company, raised a $60M Series B extension
- QuantHealth: AI clinical trial simulation company, raised a $45M Series B
- River AI: AI local model company, raised $1.1B
- Rocket: AI app-building company, in talks to raise $40M–$50M
- Silicon Data: AI compute-pricing data platform company, raised a $30.5M Series A
- Simplismart: AI inference infrastructure company, in talks to raise $50M
- Skan AI: AI enterprise workflow intelligence company, raised $63M
- Thrive Holdings: AI-enabled legacy services holding company, raised $2B+
- Trajectory: AI continual-learning model company, raised $40M
- Visoid: AI architectural visualization company, raised $2.5M
- Wippi: AI voice products for children company, raised a $1.2M seed