Funding & Deals

Lambda in talks to raise up to $3B at a $12B-plus valuation

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Lambda in talks to raise up to $3B at a $12B-plus valuation

The neocloud fundraising wave keeps rolling. Nvidia-backed Lambda is reportedly in talks to raise up to $3 billion in a pre-IPO round that would value the GPU cloud provider above $12 billion — with revenue this year already estimated to top $1.5 billion, per Bloomberg. WSJ separately reports the company has raised over $1.5 billion, putting one of the largest independent AI compute players firmly on a path to a public listing. Reuters, Bloomberg and WSJ report that Nvidia-backed neocloud…

ResNet co-author Ren Shaoqing founds embodied-AI unicorn

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ResNet co-author Ren Shaoqing founds embodied-AI unicorn

One of China's most-cited AI scientists is now an embodied-AI founder — without leaving his day job. The move caps a week when every major Chinese robotics player seemed to be carving out a separate entity. NIO's head of autonomous driving, Ren Shaoqing — a co-author of the landmark ResNet paper — has quietly registered a physical-AI and embodied-intelligence company that's already valued at unicorn levels, with NIO taking a strategic stake. CEO Li Bin announced the venture at an…

Altman calls AI doom-scenario marketing "anti-human"

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Altman calls AI doom-scenario marketing "anti-human"

Sam Altman used an hour-long podcast appearance to accuse parts of the AI industry of selling doom and grandeur in the same breath — while leaked codenames the same day hinted both OpenAI and Anthropic are closer than expected to putting their next models on the market. Sam Altman spent a podcast interview attacking what he calls the "anti-human" doomer marketing some AI leaders use — a direct swipe at rivals who pair catastrophic-risk warnings with promises of miracle cures.

Generalist adds $200M to its robot-foundation-model war chest

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Generalist adds $200M to its robot-foundation-model war chest

Robotics-foundation-model funding shows no sign of cooling: Generalist, the San Mateo lab building models that make physical tasks general, has quietly raised around $200 million in a round led by 8VC — barely two months after closing a $400 million Series B in June. The new money pushes the startup's total haul past $650 million and lands it squarely in a sprint with General Intuition and Physical Intelligence for the "ChatGPT moment" of robots. Generalist spun up GEN-1 in April, a model…

Musk at first Cursor all-hands concedes Anthropic leads the AI race

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Musk at first Cursor all-hands concedes Anthropic leads the AI race

At his first all-hands as Cursor's new owner, Elon Musk told employees exactly where he thinks Grok stands — and where the frontier sits without him. The session, reported by The Information, carried a strikingly rare note of public humility from a founder who usually beats the drum: Musk said Grok still needs to catch up, that Anthropic is leading the AI race, and that AI is heading toward a point where it will become impossible for humans to control. Musk used his first Cursor all-hands to…

XPeng's robotics unit raises $900M to chase Tesla in humanoid robots

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XPeng's robotics unit raises $900M to chase Tesla in humanoid robots

XPeng's robotics unit raised $900 million in its first round — a shot across Tesla's bow in the humanoid race. The Chinese EV maker said its robotics business pulled in the money from IDG and Gaorong Ventures at a valuation of more than $6.3 billion, with Tencent and Alibaba on the cap table. It's one of the largest funding rounds for an embodied-AI startup in China to date, and it lands days after Unitree, another local robotics maker, priced a humanoid IPO on the mainland. Why it matters…

Nvidia's Groq 3 LPX inference chip enters full production

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Nvidia's Groq 3 LPX inference chip enters full production

Nvidia commercialized its largest acquisition at Hot Chips 2026 on Monday, while a New York startup betting that video games can teach robots how to move pulled in fresh capital at a $6 billion valuation. Here's what moved in AI hardware and physical AI. Nvidia said its dedicated inference accelerator Groq 3 LPX has entered full production, turning the company's record $20 billion purchase of Groq into a shipping product.

Cerebras CS-4 doubles accelerator performance on the same chip

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Cerebras CS-4 doubles accelerator performance on the same chip

A new rack-scale AI accelerator, a nine-figure robotics raise, and fresh evidence that chatbots quietly steer sensitive-health decisions — all in the last few hours. Cerebras has introduced the CS-4, a rack-scale AI accelerator its CEO Andrew Feldman calls the fastest system in the industry. The machine still runs on the same 5nm WSE-3 wafer as its predecessor, but Cerebras says it doubles the CS-3's performance by pushing clock speed higher through more power and better cooling.

Nvidia in talks to invest in Perplexity at $30B-plus valuation

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Nvidia in talks to invest in Perplexity at $30B-plus valuation

The funding treadmill keeps spinning, and Nvidia keeps footing the bill. This time the check is reportedly headed to Perplexity, the AI search upstart that has quietly turned itself into one of the sector's fastest-growing revenue stories. Nvidia is negotiating an investment in Perplexity at a valuation above $30 billion — more than 50 percent higher than the company's last funding round a year ago — according to a report from The Information.