Funding & Deals - SiliconNoon (Page 28)

The Guardrails

America's first AI tax: taxing tokens to fund the jobs AI takes

This week, three House Democrats introduced the first serious federal proposal to tax AI usage itself — a levy on the tokens companies sell and the revenue they take in, bankrolling a New Deal-style jobs program. The bill has essentially no chance of passing a Republican-controlled House. It matters anyway: it is the moment Washington started trying to put a price on AI-driven displacement, and the fight over how to tax AI is fast becoming the Democratic Party's liveliest policy argument…

The Arena

OpenAI acquires presentation startup NextSlide

Two moves in the last day quietly extended what AI assistants can do at work: OpenAI is pulling presentation-making talent into ChatGPT, and Anthropic's Claude Code sessions just learned to talk to each other. OpenAI has acquired NextSlide, a year-old startup whose AI turns prompts, notes, documents and research into polished, editable presentation decks. Founder Ahmed Beshry announced the team has joined OpenAI and is now working on ChatGPT; financial terms were not disclosed.

The Arena

Amazon backs a 7.65 GW gas plant for an off-grid Texas AI campus

The AI power arms race just crossed a new line: Amazon is behind what could become the largest fossil-fuel power plant ever built in the US, and it exists for one customer — Amazon's own AI data centers. Amazon has confirmed it acquired GW Ranch, a site in Pecos County, West Texas, where it plans to build a 7.65-gigawatt natural gas plant to power its first off-grid AI data center campus — a project that state permits suggest could become the single largest source of emissions in the country.

The Stack

The CPU is back — Red Hat's case for CPU-first inference

Red Hat's engineers argue the agentic era is rewriting the compute economics of AI — and the data from Intel, Arm, and NVIDIA backs them up. Red Hat is making a forceful case that the CPU is back in AI infrastructure, and it's hard to argue with the numbers it marshals. In a post from its developer advocates that hit the top of Hacker News, the company argues that agentic AI — tool calls, multistep reasoning, and orchestration across many small specialized models — fundamentally changes where…

The Arena

AMD buys Taalas to hardwire AI models into silicon

Inference is where the AI hardware war is being fought, and AMD just made its biggest move yet: a definitive deal to acquire Taalas, the Toronto startup that etches model weights directly into transistors. Also in the mix: a 2-bit Qwen3.6 that fits on a 16 GB GPU, and Anthropic's quiet worry that its money is outrunning its mission. AMD has agreed to acquire Taalas, the AI-inference startup that bakes a model's weights and dataflow directly into silicon.

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