Alibaba unveils its Zhenwu V900 AI chip, calling it China’s most powerful, as CEO Eddie Wu says the T-Head accelerator delivers triple its predecessor’s performance and can scale to 500,000-chip clusters for frontier-model training.
OpenAI now projects $856 billion in compute and infrastructure spending through 2030—43% above its February target—while lowering expected 2026–2030 cash burn to $278 billion as partners help finance data-center commitments.
Typesafe AI emerges from stealth with Jev, a software-to-software model it says delivers frontier-level intelligence for just over 4 cents per million input tokens, backed by $40 million and developed by former OpenAI researcher Diogo Almeida.
Manus seeks $500 million at a $4 billion valuation in its first funding round since Beijing ordered the Chinese-founded AI startup to split from Meta Platforms, with negotiations still underway.
Arcee AI raises at least $150 million in a Series B at a $1 billion pre-money valuation, with Vista Equity Partners, Cambium Capital, and Emergence Capital backing expansion of its models, products, and U.S. Department of Energy partnership.
AIUC raises a $40 million Series A led by Ribbit Capital to audit and certify AI agents, using its AIUC-1 system to test roughly 5,000 jailbreak, hallucination, and data-leak scenarios for customers including Cursor, Harvey, Lovable, and ElevenLabs.
CADDi raises a $114 million Series D at a $1.2 billion valuation to accelerate its North American push and build manufacturing-specific AI models, with Salesforce Ventures, Woven Capital and Moore Strategic Ventures joining the round.
Intel-backed construction AI startup Buildots raises $130 million, led by Eyal Ofer’s OG Venture Partners, to speed construction of data centers, chip factories and hospitals, bringing its total funding to $297 million.
SoftBank secures an upsized $11.87 billion two-year loan from roughly 20 banks for its OpenAI investment, while its shares plunge as much as 13% amid plans to repay $25.9 billion in September and potentially sell up to $20 billion in U.S. junk bonds.
Index Ventures says FOMO-driven AI investing can be viable as startups across models, chips, healthcare, legal and defense command $1 billion-plus valuations, provided founders are solving real customer problems.