Big Tech built its reputation on mountains of cash. It is building its AI empire on debt, and the bill is starting to land in Europe. The five biggest builders of AI data centres in the US have doubled their debt over five years. Together, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Oracle have piled on about […]
The letter reads like a founder’s article of faith. The share sale underneath it tells a harder story. The founder of MiniMax has told staff he will take no salary until the Chinese AI company builds artificial general intelligence. On the same day, MiniMax moved to raise as much as $2bn from investors. Its shares […]
A three-year-old startup run by a 23-year-old is in talks to double its worth to $20bn. The numbers are dazzling. Read the footnotes. Mercor, the AI training marketplace, has told investors it can raise at a $20bn valuation. It says it already holds at least one term sheet at that price, Bloomberg reports. The talks […]
Anthropic is the hottest stock in private tech. It is also one of the hardest to buy, and that is exactly why the price keeps climbing. Shares in Anthropic are changing hands on secondary markets at an implied valuation of $1.2 trillion, Business Insider reports. That is a 550% jump in a year. It puts […]
Nanya Technology spent years as the also-ran of the memory business, the Taiwanese DRAM maker that Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron never had to worry about much. The AI boom has changed the arithmetic. The company now plans to spend around $6bn in 2027 as it races to expand capacity into a memory shortage that […]
Europe uses about a fifth of the world’s chips, but makes only a tenth of them. A three-year-old Munich startup thinks it can help close that gap, and Brussels has just backed the bet. QuantumDiamonds is a spin-out of the Technical University of Munich. It has raised €91M to scale a new way of finding […]
Japan’s biggest payments app and its most famous convenience-store chain may be about to get closer. SoftBank and its payments arm PayPay are in talks to invest in Seven & i Holdings, the retailer behind 7-Eleven, according to Bloomberg, which reported the discussions on Friday. Neither the size nor the structure of any deal has […]
Manus was, briefly, one of the most valuable exits in Chinese AI. Meta agreed to buy the agentic AI startup for more than $2bn late last year, then watched Beijing block the deal on national-security grounds. Now the company is being bought back by the people who owned it in the first place, and Tencent looks set […]
Jeff Bezos is letting outside investors into Blue Origin for the first time since he founded it in 2000. The rocket company is seeking about $10bn in fresh capital at a $130bn pre-money valuation, according to CNBC. For 26 years, Bezos bankrolled the company himself, selling billions in Amazon stock rather than sharing ownership. That solo-funding […]
Ollama has raised a $65M Series B led by Theory Ventures. Benchmark, 8VC, Y Combinator and others joined. The round takes the company’s total funding to $88M, three years after it launched, and Ollama set out the plan in a blog post on Thursday. Founder and chief executive Jeff Morgan gave the details to TechCrunch, […]
