AI funding boom: record $510B H1 2026, physical AI and inference chips surge; Stripe in talks to acquire OpenRouter for $10B

Global startup investment hit $510B in H1 2026, AI firms nearly half. Physical AI and inference chip funding surged: DeepSeek $7.4B, Etched $800M at $5B then new $300M at $10.3B, Together AI $800M, SambaNova $1B, Crusoe $3B talks, Prometheus $12B, Baseten $1.5B. Stripe negotiating $10B acquisition of OpenRouter. Anthropic projected >$1B quarterly profit. UK AI funding $12.6B, 4x YoY. Nvidia released Cosmos 3 Edge robotics model. Physical AI startups raised $8.73B across 32 deals. Meta in talks to lease $10B compute to Anthropic. Seed funding heavily concentrated (43% to OpenAI/Anthropic). European startup funding hit six-year deal-count low as AI absorbs 60% of deal value, signaling a seed drought. Antora raised $550M for thermal batteries targeting data centers and factories, addressing the energy bottleneck for AI compute. AI stock selloff analyzed as positioning unwinding.