Updated
Updated
AIOracle, Broadcom and SpaceX are seeking blockbuster debt financing to pay for AI chips. Lenders including Apollo, Blackstone and Goldman Sachs are in talks on megadeals worth tens of billions of dollars apiece.
AIBiohub, the nonprofit backed by Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, is coordinating a $1.8 billion effort covering data, lab equipment, and compute. Meta, Google DeepMind, and Isomorphic Labs are contributing a combined $300 million, and the US Department of Energy is investing over $500 million over five years. Commercial funders get one year of exclusive access to data they paid for, while government-funded data will be public without that restriction, and a first dataset is expected in about a year.
AINous Research, developer of the open source Hermes Agent, raised a $90 million Series B at a $1.5 billion valuation led by Robot Ventures. The capital will fund its enterprise push with Hermes for Businesses, which lets companies deploy customized AI agents for multi-step workflows while keeping data private. The article reports about $36 million in annualized revenue by mid-September 2026, citing The Wall Street Journal.
AIManus' parent company Butterfly Effect said it raised more than $500 million, its first funding round since Meta called off its $2 billion acquisition. Boyu Capital and IDG Capital led the round, and existing shareholders including Tencent also participated, though the valuation was not disclosed.
AIZach Yadegari, the teen co-founder of calorie tracking app Cal AI, has launched Persona, a personal AI assistant startup that has raised $10 million led by Vine Ventures. Persona will offer a $179 wearable band that activates via button or wrist flick, with the model running in the cloud rather than on the device. The band is expected in December, and Persona is currently a free beta available through iMessage.
AISpaceX is buying spectrum licenses to build a mobile network that would compete with major telecom companies. The source provides no further details on the licenses' cost, timing, or network specifications.
AILooking forward to collaborating on the future of science!
AISpaceX announced an agreement to buy a nationwide 800 MHz spectrum portfolio from Grain Management, subject to FCC approval. The license covers up to 14 MHz of paired spectrum and is intended to help Starlink become a major US mobile carrier. AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile shares fell in extended trading after the announcement.
AIFirmus Technologies withdrew its application to list on the ASX after investor demand for its AI datacentre business failed to materialise. The company had an anticipated $44bn valuation and planned to raise $7bn ahead of a 23 October listing, and will now seek private capital instead.
AICNBC's Jim Cramer said Thursday's AI stock sell-off, which followed a Financial Times report that OpenAI's annualized revenue was about $20 billion below previously signaled levels, shows why investors need diversification. Oracle fell 5.5% and Broadcom dropped 4.35%, while Home Depot rallied as Treasury yields eased. Cramer argued that concentrated portfolios risk panic-selling and missing a recovery.
AIAlphabet spinoff Isomorphic Labs is reportedly in early-stage talks to raise a new funding round at a valuation of $40 billion to $50 billion, according to Bloomberg, which did not specify the round's size. Isomorphic's flagship AI platform, IsoDDE, is designed to automate binding pocket discovery, which it says is more than 50% better than the closest competing tool, and it models antibody interactions about 2.3 times better than AlphaFold. The company earns revenue through research partnerships with Eli Lilly, Novartis and Johnson & Johnson.
AIPrima Mente and AlzData are launching the Alzheimer's Translation Challenge, a global AI competition to discover new therapeutic hypotheses for Alzheimer's disease. The challenge centers on a 150M cell atlas of neurons, astrocytes, and microglia across different genetic backgrounds under combinatorial perturbations, with multi-modal readouts. Top teams will have their hypotheses tested in Prima Mente's wet lab, and the data will be available through the AD workbench, Hugging Face, and Prima Mente's modeling platform.
AIApplied Digital shares fell about 2.5% after first-quarter revenue rose more than 320% year over year and beat estimates. CEO Wes Cummins said the gap between revenue growth and the share reaction should narrow over the next 12 months. He expects all contracted capacity to be online in roughly 20 to 22 months.
AIOpenAI told investors it reached roughly $50 billion in annualized revenue at the end of September, below the $68 billion figure widely reported last month. Nvidia, Oracle, and CoreWeave shares fell on Thursday, with a person familiar saying the $68 billion figure included partner gross revenue. OpenAI is also weighing a possible funding round of around $30 billion and has not finalized a term sheet.
AISafeWorld emerged from stealth this week with $12.2 million in seed funding for its robot safety simulation platform. The software lets teams build test scenarios from past incidents, safety standards, and robot logs, then runs robots through thousands of variations with reactive human motion. SafeWorld said it supports robot arms, humanoids, and mobile robots, with customers in industrial, manufacturing, logistics, and construction.
AIManus, the developer of the Manus AI agent, has raised more than $500 million led by Boyu Capital, with Tencent also investing. Bloomberg had reported a $4 billion valuation, roughly double Meta's reported offer last December, which Chinese regulators blocked in April. The funding comes days after Manus 2.0 added a new harness, Cloud Computer, and Cue, which lets agents use email accounts and digital wallets.
AIQualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon discusses the coming AI smartphone supercycle, arguing phones will not disappear as agents use personal context. He also expects smart glasses to become the largest AI wearable category, and covers Qualcomm's Modular acquisition as an alternative to Nvidia's CUDA software and its data center strategy. The conversation, recorded live at the Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii, also covers 6G being designed for AI.
AIMicrosoft will replace per-user OneDrive allowances on Microsoft 365 Family and Premium plans with a shared 2 TB storage pool, down from 6 TB across six accounts. Heavy users could face bills that double or triple, since each extra 1 TB adds $10 a month, while family members will be able to share a single AI usage allowance. New and upgraded subscriptions get shared storage starting Oct. 8, 2026, and existing subscribers move at their first renewal on or after May 2, 2027.
AIThe U.S. Department of Labor said it suspended Microsoft and Adobe from its Permanent Labor Certification program, citing multiple active federal investigations. Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling also said no new applications will be accepted for Cognizant, Infosys, Capgemini, Tata, Wipro and HCL. Microsoft said the vast majority of its U.S. employees are Americans and that 80% of its roughly 6,000 H-1B petitions last fiscal year were to extend or change the status of existing employees.
AIArena, the crowdsourced AI model leaderboard that started as a UC Berkeley research project, raised a $200 million Series B at a $3.1 billion valuation, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Khosla Ventures. The company said it reached $100 million in annualized run-rate revenue in June, up from $30 million when it raised its $150 million Series A in January at a $1.7 billion post-money valuation.
AIOpenAI has reportedly told investors its annualized revenue is approaching $50 billion, about $20 billion below a previously reported $70 billion figure. The Financial Times reports the earlier number came from investor attempts to compare OpenAI with Anthropic, which counts cloud partners' sales differently. OpenAI's IPO has reportedly been pushed to early 2027.
AIAutomation Anywhere Inc. announced an agreement to acquire Boost.ai Inc., a conversational voice AI company, from Nordic Capital, to extend its autonomous enterprise platform into customer experience. Boost.ai supports more than 36 languages, serves hundreds of customers in regulated industries and Europe, and maintains more than 650 deployments and about 600 live AI agents. The deal follows Automation Anywhere's late 2025 acquisition of Aisera Inc.
AISpaceXAI is joining the Omacom Foundation, which oversees the Omarchy Linux distribution, as a Founding Corporate Patron and donating $1.5 million worth of Grok tokens to the project. According to David Heinemeier Hansson's blog post, the tokens will primarily accelerate development, review code, and patch bugs. The partnership follows earlier controversy over Hansson's anti-immigration posts, which have drawn criticism of Omarchy's corporate contributors, including 1Password and Cloudflare.
AIFirmus Grid Ltd., a Nvidia-backed data center company, abandoned one of Australia's biggest-ever initial public offerings after failing to attract global investors wary of frothy AI valuations. The source provides no further details on offering size or valuation.
AILightspeed Venture Partners co-leaders Ravi Mhatre and Bejul Somaia halted partner schedules in April 2023 for a seven-hour meeting on how to respond to AI. The firm had missed early stakes in OpenAI, ElevenLabs and Hugging Face, and was poised to back Anthropic.