October centered on IPO preparations, infrastructure financing, and accelerating AI investment as frontier platforms scaled revenue and compute requirements. Anthropic filed for a Nasdaq IPO under “ANT,” with valuation discussions around ~$1.5T, while reporting $16.3B of H1 2026 revenue and securing a $63B financing package for Broadcom chips and networking equipment. OpenAI reportedly secured ~$11B of funding commitments at a $1.25T valuation, below its initial $30B target, as annualized revenue approached $50B and Broadcom sought more than $50B to finance custom-chip infrastructure. Meta expanded Muse agents, completed the first phase of its Prometheus supercluster, and outlined up to $97.5B of financing. Big Tech earnings reinforced the scale of the buildout, with Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft collectively planning substantial 2026 capex.
Financing rose to $45.1B across 252 transactions, led by DeepSeek’s ~$15.0B private round backed by GigaDevice, Meituan, CATL, and Tencent. Tenstorrent followed with a $1.5B Series E, while Flapping Airplanes raised a $1.0B Series A and TypeSafe AI secured $870M. Additional large rounds included Modal ($750M), Furiosa ($620M), Bedrock ($600M), Legora ($550M), Manus (>$500M), and Neolix (~$400M). Activity broadened across AI labs, chips, cloud infrastructure, legal AI, agents, and autonomous systems, with both deal count and capital formation rebounding sharply from September and investor appetite broadening across regions.