Funding & Deals - SiliconNoon (Page 13)

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Cohere in advanced talks to raise up to $3 billion at $20 billion

Funding news leads the afternoon, and it comes with a government's fingerprints on it. Then Suno ships its first music models built alongside the labels it once fought. Cohere is in advanced talks to raise between $2 billion and $3 billion at a $20 billion valuation, with the Canadian government and existing backers among the financiers, according to a report in the Globe and Mail. Bloomberg corroborated the talks at up to $3 billion.

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Roblox hands creators AI tools — and a path off Roblox

RDC26 is the day's main event: Roblox is rewriting where its games can live. Also below — Chengdu drafts a subsidy for your token bill, and Meta's next headset shows its face early. Roblox used its developer conference to hand creators AI building tools — and, more strategically, a way to ship what they build somewhere else.

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Moonshot AI files for Hong Kong IPO at $50B — days after Anthropic calls it out

The same week Anthropic accused Moonshot of secretly routing Kimi users to Claude, the Beijing lab quietly filed for what may be the most closely watched Chinese AI IPO in years. Moonshot AI has confidentially filed for a Hong Kong IPO that could raise $3 billion at a valuation near $50 billion, according to sources speaking to Reuters — likely the most anticipated near-term listing from a Chinese AI lab.

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OpenAI picked a new vertical as the BIS warns on the AI boom

OpenAI picked a new vertical, the bank for central banks picked a fight with the AI capex boom, and Wall Street is bracing for the biggest IPO window in years. Three stories, one theme: AI and money are now the same conversation. OpenAI has launched ChatGPT for Financial Services, a tailored ChatGPT Work edition that pairs built-in premium financial data with GPT-6 Astra's reasoning.

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Universal Music and ElevenLabs sign first major-label AI music deal

The world's largest record company has stopped treating AI music companies purely as defendants — it just handed one of them a license to its catalog. Universal Music Group and ElevenLabs have signed a multi-year strategic agreement — ElevenLabs' first with a major label — that starts with a licensed AI music platform where fans can remix and mash up real artists' music.

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Amazon blocked AI agents for a year. Now it sells ads inside one

Amazon spent twelve months walling its catalog off from AI platforms — crawler blocks, a court order against Perplexity's shopping agent, product feeds cut from Google Shopping. On Thursday it announced the thing all that blocking was quietly building toward: its advertisers can now run ads inside ChatGPT. The mechanics are narrower than the headline.

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Positron bets $875 million that inference doesn't need expensive memory

A chip startup raises a massive round on the thesis that commodity memory can outpace HBM for running AI models, and a warehouse robotics company finally steps out of the shadows. Positron AI raised $875 million in a Series C round at a $5 billion valuation, doubling down on a "memory-first" architecture for AI inference that sidesteps the HBM bottleneck entirely.

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Amazon hands its advertisers to ChatGPT

Two moves this afternoon that say the same thing from opposite ends of the stack: AI is where the money and the compute are heading next. Amazon is letting its advertisers buy inventory inside ChatGPT, and Qualcomm is rebuilding its phone silicon around agents that never phone home. Amazon is letting its advertisers run ads inside ChatGPT, and the world's largest online retailer just validated OpenAI's ad business. The pilot, announced Thursday, lets select U.S.

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DeepSeek preps a STAR Market IPO — and cuts prices 60% the same day

China's most-watched AI lab spent Wednesday doing two things that pull in opposite directions: quietly hiring the bankers for a Shanghai listing, and publicly retreating from the price increases it imposed three weeks ago. DeepSeek has hired CITIC Securities to prepare an IPO on Shanghai's STAR Market, with the listing process expected to begin within the year, according to people familiar with the matter.

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Alibaba leads a $300M round in UniPat AI, a model-testing lab it spawned

Two of the morning's stories come out of the same place: the bottleneck on agentic AI is no longer the model, it's knowing whether the model actually did the job. Alibaba is set to lead a $300 million round in UniPat AI at a $2.5 billion valuation, Bloomberg reported, with Tencent and existing backer Sequoia China also taking part.

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Google puts €13 billion into Finland — its biggest European bet yet

Two very different kinds of infrastructure news this morning: Google committing the largest single investment it has ever made in Europe, and OpenAI's newest model quietly running a physics lab overnight. One is about where the compute goes; the other is about what the compute now does unsupervised. Google will spend €13 billion ($15.1 billion) on AI infrastructure in Finland over the next two years, its largest single investment in Europe.

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Chanos asks why Nvidia sells the GPUs if renting them is this good

Jensen Huang says Nvidia's compute is "fungible, durable and highly rentable." One of Wall Street's best-known short sellers heard that and asked the obvious question: then why are you selling it? Two days later the argument has become the cleanest framing yet for the AI capex question. Jim Chanos, who called Enron, replied to Huang's X post with four words that cut straight to the accounting: "Then why not rent them out yourself?

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