Funding & Deals - SiliconNoon (Page 25)

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Nvidia backs $500B data center deal with GPU value guarantee

The AI buildout's biggest financing machine just got its formal terms: Nvidia is guaranteeing part of the resale value of aging GPUs to keep half a trillion dollars of institutional capital flowing into data centers. Also in the feed: Ant Group's smallest open model yet punches above its weight, and Rubrik's month with Anthropic's restricted Mythos model redrew how it fixes security flaws. Nvidia has put a price floor under aging GPUs to keep its $500 billion data-center financing machine…

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Edge-LLM maker ModelBest files for IPO at ¥20B

China's on-device AI champion is heading to public markets: ModelBest, the Beijing startup behind the MiniCPM family of edge models, has formally begun the process of listing on the A-share market — the latest sign that China's model labs are treating public listings, not venture rounds, as the endgame. ModelBest filed its IPO counseling registration with the Beijing bureau of the securities regulator on August 11, with CITIC Securities guiding the process, according to Chinese financial…

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Databricks closes $5B round at $190B valuation

Thursday's biggest AI-business story is a private-market statement: Databricks closed another $5 billion round — this one at a $190 billion valuation — while Anthropic and Redwood Research shipped a benchmark index for the kind of reasoning that can't be empirically verified, and the White House opened the door for private firms to run offensive cyber operations. Databricks closed a $5 billion funding round at a $190 billion valuation on Thursday — six months after raising the same amount at…

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Ex-Qwen lead's Pragmatik Labs raises $220M at a $2B valuation

Lin Junyang, the researcher who built Alibaba's Qwen into one of the world's most-used open model families, came out of stealth early Wednesday with a company that has no product, no demo, and a $2 billion price tag. That gap is the story. Lin Junyang, the former technical lead of Alibaba's Qwen family, announced the founding of Pragmatik Labs (语用科技) in Shanghai — backed by a $220 million angel round at a $2 billion valuation, closed before the company shipped anything.

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NAND flash: AI inference boom lifts eSSDs to 48% of shipments

The AI hardware story keeps moving down the stack. This week's data from Counterpoint Research shows the shift from training to inference is now reshaping the memory market — and NAND flash makers are posting record revenue because of it. Server-grade enterprise SSDs hit 48% of all NAND flash bits shipped in Q2 2026 — nearly double their 26% share a year earlier — and the AI-driven demand surge pushed industry revenue to a record, roughly five times its level in Q2 2025. According to…

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Legora seeks $10B+ valuation, doubling in four months

The legal-AI money race just escalated: Swedish startup Legora is reportedly raising at a valuation above $10 billion, and a new Berkeley benchmark argues the industry is measuring machine learning itself all wrong. Swedish legal-AI startup Legora is seeking fresh funding at a valuation above $10 billion — roughly double the $5.6 billion it commanded just four months ago, according to the Financial Times.

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Anthropic in talks to buy Decart AI for $6B

Anthropic is closing in on its largest acquisition ever, and a Hong Kong-listed speech-AI firm is pushing medical imaging models further down the clinical path. Anthropic is in talks to buy Decart AI for about $6 billion — what would be its largest acquisition yet — according to people familiar with the matter.

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Jeff Dean's Discovery Loop seeks $1B at $10B valuation

The startup from Google's most famous engineer, announced barely a week ago, now carries a price tag that puts it in the same league as the model labs — and the money is betting on a different game entirely. Jeff Dean's Discovery Loop is in talks to raise $1 billion at a roughly $10 billion valuation, people familiar with the matter told Business Insider — one of the largest early-stage rounds ever for a company that publicly introduced itself barely a week ago.

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Silicon Data raises $30.5M to price the GPU futures market

The AI buildout's financial layer is taking shape: the firm tapped to set the reference price for CME Group's planned GPU futures market just closed a $30.5 million Series A. Silicon Data, the New York startup building independent pricing and performance benchmarks for AI compute, announced a $30.5 million initial close of its Series A led by the Valor Atreides AI Fund, with CME Ventures, DRW, F-Prime, Samsung Next, VanEck, Further, Jump, Tectonic and Wintermute also participating.

Today in AI

Today in AI — August 12, 2026

Two frontier models shipped and the biggest open-weight model yet went public, while the AI buildout posted another round of record earnings and security headlines swung from an autonomous attack on a government to a teenage gang's supply-chain breach — all against a backdrop of regulators from London to Beijing drawing new lines. Models & Research * DeepSeek took V4 Pro to general availability, ending a four-month preview — the 1.6-trillion-parameter MoE flagship (49 billion active…

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Cisco sees AI infrastructure revenue nearly doubling to $7.5B

The AI buildout keeps printing money for the companies selling its plumbing — and its appetite for training data just met its first organized resistance at the bookstore counter. Cisco said hyperscalers placed $9.3 billion in AI infrastructure orders in fiscal 2026, and it expects AI infrastructure revenue to nearly double to $7.5 billion this fiscal year.

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Cerebras beats and raises outlook — stock plunges 12% anyway

Chip earnings split the day's AI news: Cerebras beat and raised, then watched investors head for the exits — while the money behind the compute buildout quietly got itself a benchmark layer. Cerebras reported second-quarter core revenue of $210 million, ahead of the $194 million it had guided to, raised its full-year outlook to $880–890 million — and still saw its stock plunge about 12 percent in extended trading.

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