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The money pouring into AI is increasingly spent after the model is trained — on the steady, unglamorous work of running inference at scale. A new funding round today shows where a slice of that budget is heading. Callosum Ltd. has raised $100 million to build software that makes AI applications cheaper and faster to run.
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Nvidia is moving to take a direct financial stake in the company that already feeds its own models — a signal that the chip giant now treats training data as strategically captive as silicon. Nvidia is in talks to lead a round that would value Mercor, an AI training-data supplier, at roughly $20 billion — double the $10 billion it commanded just weeks ago.
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Michael Burry, the investor who famously shorted the housing market before the 2008 crash, is now betting against Nvidia's dominance in AI chips — and he has a specific name in mind. Burry highlighted Etched, a Harvard-dropout-founded startup, as presenting "serious competition" for Nvidia in the AI inference hardware market, sending the signal that Wall Street is starting to take challengers seriously. Etched isn't vaporware.
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Stripe told investors this week that January 1 marked the "beginning of the singularity" — and backed the claim with a 41% year-over-year revenue jump in the first half of 2026. The fintech giant's investor letter frames AI as the next economic infrastructure layer. Patrick Collison's company sent the letter alongside its announcement to acquire OpenRouter for $7.5 billion, calling tokens "the new currency of intelligence capital." The letter argues that every business will soon need to manage…
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SpaceX reportedly tried to buy Cognition, the startup behind the Devin coding agent, in what would have been its second major AI coding acquisition in months — but CEO Scott Wu says it's not happening. Bloomberg reported Wednesday that SpaceX was in talks to acquire Cognition, citing people familiar with the matter. Wu pushed back within hours, writing on X that the story was inaccurate and that Cognition "is not for sale," adding the two companies haven't been in negotiations.
The Frontier
A massive seed round just landed in the world-model space. Veeda, a new startup building world models and led by Sanja Fidler — formerly Nvidia's VP of AI Research — has raised over $90 million in seed funding from Khosla Ventures and Radical Ventures, according to The Logic. World models — systems that learn to simulate how the physical world works — have become one of the hottest frontiers in AI since NVIDIA open-sourced Cosmos 3 earlier this year.
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The AI race has a new revenue leader. For the first time, Anthropic has overtaken OpenAI in quarterly revenue — a milestone that reshapes the competitive landscape just as OpenAI prepares for its IPO. Anthropic hit $11.6 billion in second-quarter revenue, roughly doubling from the first quarter, while OpenAI reported $6.7 billion — up 18 percent from $5.7 billion in Q1.
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OpenAI is taking its ad experiment global — six months after piloting sponsored placements in the US, ChatGPT Ads rolls out next week across 31 European countries including Germany, France, Spain, Italy, and the Nordics. It's the largest single expansion yet for a monetization strategy that could reshape how AI companies fund free-tier access. ChatGPT Ads expands to 31 European markets.
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The Pentagon wants AI on the battlefield faster, and venture capital is following the order. Austin-based Smack Technologies, which builds AI decision-making tools for the US military, announced a $61 million Series B led by Costanoa and First In on Monday, adding fresh fuel to the growing defense-AI pipeline. The round is small in the context of frontier AI spending — but it lands at an inflection point.
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Two big moves from the infrastructure side of AI today — one in software, one in hardware — both pointing the same direction: the market is betting heavily on the tools that make AI actually work in production. Temporal is in talks for a fresh funding round that would value the open-source orchestration platform at over $12 billion, with a raise of roughly $500 million. Bloomberg reports the deal is still in progress, but the valuation alone tells the story.
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The booked quarter is in, and it does not look like the annualized story OpenAI has been selling. OpenAI's second-quarter revenue grew 18 percent from the first quarter to $6.7 billion, according to people familiar with the figures cited by the Wall Street Journal — and its operating margin got worse, though the paper did not say by how much. Some investors were disappointed. The company told them growth picked up again in the third quarter.
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Anthropic is not just preparing a public float. It is rewriting who gets to tell the founders no once the stock starts trading. The Information reported Tuesday that Anthropic has been preparing a new class of stock with extra voting power for CEO Dario Amodei and the other co-founders — the first time the Claude maker's leaders would hold that kind of control — to insulate them from outside shareholder pressure.