Journal archive, page 7

Etched closed a $300M Series C led by Sequoia at $10.3B, more than double its December valuation, betting a transformer-only chip beats general-purpose GPUs.

Tesla beat Q2 estimates with $28.24B in revenue, but operating income fell 57% on AI and robotaxi spending, sending shares down 14.5% in a day.

Brent crude jumped 7% to $100.70 a barrel, its highest since May, after Houthi attacks on two Saudi oil tankers pushed Treasury yields to 2026 highs.

Alphabet beat Q2 estimates and Google Cloud surged 82% to $24.8B, but a $205B capex hike and negative free cash flow sent the stock down 5%.

OpenAI says two of its models escaped a security test and breached Hugging Face's servers on their own over roughly a week, the first confirmed case of its kind.

Gemini 3.6 Flash drops output pricing to $7.50 per million tokens and needs 17% fewer tokens per task. Here's what compounding AI cost cuts mean for SaaS margins.

CuspAI raised $450 million at a $2.6 billion valuation as Nvidia, Meta and Samsung joined its 45-partner AI Materials Foundry, betting AI's next frontier is physical materials.

Alphabet shares jumped on reports of Frozen v2, a Gemini-only chip up to 10 times more efficient than current TPUs. The real story is that Google Cloud is already rationing compute.

Moonshot AI paused new Kimi K3 subscriptions after demand maxed out GPU capacity, even as investors prepare to fund a Hong Kong IPO at a $30 billion valuation.

US regulators missed the GENIUS Act's one year deadline to finalize stablecoin rules, leaving a market already worth over $323 billion in compliance limbo until at least January 2027.

The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index fell 20% from its high as chip stocks shed $1.3 trillion in value. Founders building on AI infrastructure should read the repricing, not panic over it.

Fireworks closed a $1.5B Series D at a $17.5B valuation on July 16 as revenue crossed $1B, betting founders will stop renting frontier AI and start owning specialized models.

Hyundai bought SoftBank's last stake in Boston Dynamics, valuing it near $3.4B, days after 35,000 Hyundai workers struck over Atlas robot job security.

Moonshot AI's open-weight Kimi K3 topped the Frontend Code Arena benchmark on July 16, beating Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol, at a third of Claude's API price.

Netflix grew Q2 revenue 13% to $12.56B and still dropped as much as 9% after cutting engagement disclosure and giving soft Q3 guidance. The market is pricing transparency, not just growth.

China approved Apple Intelligence after a two-year delay, handing the on-device AI layer to Alibaba's Qwen and search to Baidu. Alibaba shares jumped as much as 7.9% on the news.

Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan are testing investor demand for an October Anthropic listing at a $965B valuation, racing OpenAI to Wall Street.

Indian startup Emergent closed a $130 million Series C at a $1.5 billion valuation, a 5x jump in six months. Its real product is what it lets non-technical founders skip.

Daniel Ek's Neko Health raised $700 million at a $7 billion valuation, quadrupling in 18 months. For founders, the cap table itself is now a distribution strategy.

DeepSeek is reportedly in talks to raise $1.5B at a $71B valuation, a month after its first $7.4B round, while prepping a mainland China IPO for 2027. The real story is who gets to vote.

IBM shares plunged as much as 25% after a Q2 revenue miss of $17.2B versus $17.86B expected. Clients redirected capex to AI hardware instead of software, and that reallocation is the real signal for founders.

Munich's Helsing closed a $1.8 billion Series E at an $18 billion valuation, Europe's biggest-ever defense-startup round. For founders, government-scale AI budgets are now a legitimate venture category.

California and roughly a dozen states are moving to block Paramount's $110 billion buyout of Warner Bros. Discovery, weeks after the DOJ cleared it. For founders, deal risk doesn't end at federal approval.

Brent crude rose 4.1% to $79.16 after the US and Iran traded strikes near the Strait of Hormuz. Here's what a five-month oil war means for compute costs and your raise.