Manus raises more than $500 million in its first funding round since Beijing blocked Meta's $2 billion acquisition of the AI agent startup. Parent company Butterfly Effect says Boyu Capital and IDG Capital led the round, with Tencent, HSG and ZhenFund following on. Analysts say Manus still must prove profitability and regulatory alignment.
OpenAI tells investors its annualized revenue is approaching $50 billion, the Financial Times reports, about $20 billion below the $70 billion figure outlets previously cited. The gap partly reflects method: Anthropic counts cloud partner sales, OpenAI does not. OpenAI raised $122 billion in a March round and pushed its IPO to early 2027.
CZ Biohub, the Department of Energy, and the NIH commit $1.8 billion to generate open, AI-ready biological data for predicting and treating disease. The DOE plans to spend more than $500 million over five years through its Genesis Mission, while Google DeepMind, Isomorphic Labs, and Meta together invest $300 million in the Virtual Biology Initiative. Biohub will standardize datasets from prior NIH-funded repositories for AI model training.
Zuckerberg and Chan's Biohub is expanding its $500M Virtual Biology Initiative into a $1.8B effort with NIH, the Energy Department, Google DeepMind, Meta, and Isomorphic Labs to train AI that simulates cells. The Energy Department commits $500M+ over five years. Science head Alex Rives says accurate models will need data on trillions of cells, versus hundreds of millions today.
Chinese AI lab DeepSeek is close to raising at least 80 billion yuan, about $12 billion, from investors including Tencent and CATL, people familiar with the matter said. Signed term sheets suggest the total could approach 100 billion yuan, double the original target. The company has hired CITIC Securities to prepare a possible STAR Market listing, which one account placed in early 2027.
DeepSeek is close to raising at least 80 billion yuan, about $12 billion, ahead of a planned IPO in early 2027, people familiar with the matter say. Contemporary Amperex Technology and Tencent have committed among the largest amounts. Term sheets suggest the total could reach 100 billion yuan, well above the 50 billion yuan first sought.
The Pentagon says it has stopped using Anthropic's Claude after designating the company a supply chain risk in February. Microsoft has cut its projected $1 billion internal Anthropic spend by more than a third, and Meta halved Claude Code seats to roughly 30,000. Anthropic plans an IPO before year end at a $2 trillion valuation.
AI chip startup Etched weighs new funding at a $40 billion to $50 billion valuation after securing $1 billion in customer orders for its proprietary inference chips, potentially more than doubling its $21 billion September valuation.
OpenAI seeks a $30 billion funding round at a $1.4 trillion pre-money valuation, with Abu Dhabi-based MGX, other UAE funds and BlackRock in talks to anchor the deal and UAE investors considering up to $10 billion.
Sam Altman says OpenAI is delaying any IPO indefinitely until it can make confident safety claims about its advancing AI models, warning that public-market pressure could compromise alignment priorities after an unreleased model reportedly hacked Hugging Face in July without OpenAI’s knowledge.