AI Investment Bubble & Big Tech Capex

Big Tech pours billions into AI infrastructure but customer willingness to pay remains weak. Recent developments: MiniMax H3 open multimodal model with native stereo sound; MarbleOS GUI for AI agents; DepthData and TraceLLM AI ops startups; Meta Q2 capex $31B, free cash flow down 91%; seed rounds clustering in robotics/proptech/space; weekly funding rounds include SSI $5B, Commonwealth Fusion $1B, Antora Energy $550M. Ongoing: Claude Opus 5, OpenAI voice mode, Kimi K3 open-weight, Fish Audio $52M seed, Recursive Superintelligence $410M compute deal, Hush Security $30M, Centralize $19M, Freehand $75M, ex-Meta/Slack engineers $15M AI sales tool. GPT-5.6 Sol experiment highlighted alignment challenges. Former NEA partner Vanessa Larco starts Premise VC. Antora Energy $550M Series C for thermal batteries targeting AI data centers. New: Qwen-UI-Agent paper proposes unified GUI/CLI/search runtime for AI agents, signaling shift to stateful workflows.