AI mega-rounds and compute infrastructure scale
Anthropic $1.2T secondary, OpenAI $1T IPO leaning 2027. Compute: Nvidia Rubin 10x inference; Nscale $2B; Baseten $1.5B; SoftBank €75B; DayOne $4.5B; Fireworks AI $17.5B; DeepSeek $74B; ElevenLabs $22B; Etched $10.3B; Volta exits stealth at $2.4B with vertical integration; Anthropic $10B compute deal with Volta. Fangqing $1.5B; Infinity $15M; Menlo Ventures $3B fund; Qwen3.8-Max open-weight (2.4T params); GPT-5.6 Sol; Kimi K3 beats GPT-5.6; OpenAI safety chief leaving; Mega-Cap AI IPO Wave; Valar Atomics $1B for nuclear. New: Antora Energy $550M for thermal battery (AI data center power); OLIX $312M Series B at $3.3B for custom AI inference chips (UK, Thiel Fellow) — now with UK Sovereign AI backing; Ore Energy $43M Series A for iron-air multi-day storage (European, AI-driven). Also: Exclaim Robotics $4.95M; Synteq; Qwen3.8-27B. DeepSeek V4 Flash on single AMD MI300X; Runware Sonic Inference Pods. July 2026 record $65B month with 14 billion-dollar rounds (Blue Origin $10B, SSI $5B, Moonshot AI $3.5B), 53% AI share. H1 2026 total startup funding $412.7B per Dallas report. New model releases: MiniMax H3 (multimodal video), Sakana AI Namazu (1T-param live search/code). Commonwealth Fusion raises $1B (fusion energy for AI data centers). Pie secures Amex Ventures investment for AI SMB tools.