Anthropic is in the final stages of raising a $20 billion capital infusion at a valuation of $350 billion, according to Bloomberg. Investor demand has pushed the company to seek twice the amount it originally targeted. The round includes participation from a range of venture firms and strategic partners, notably Nvidia and Microsoft, which are expected to provide the bulk of the funding. Anthropic recently rolled out new AI models for legal and business research and introduced coding agents that have been praised for boosting developer productivity. The fundraising effort comes amid intense competition among frontier AI labs and rising compute costs, with rivals like OpenAI also gearing up for large capital raises and potential IPOs. Read more →

Google has released Project Genie, an AI tool that creates playable interactive worlds from prompts or images. The experimental service, offered through the AI Ultra plan at a high monthly cost, has prompted users to generate worlds resembling popular titles such as The Legend of Zelda, GTA 5, and Kingdom Hearts. Analysts say the launch has contributed to sharp declines in the stock prices of several game developers and publishers, including CD Projekt Red, Take Two Interactive, and Nintendo. Critics argue that the technology threatens creative integrity, could lead to layoffs, and may strain hardware demand, while gamers express strong opposition to AI‑generated games. Read more →

Microsoft has begun deploying its home‑grown Maia 200 AI inference chip in its data centers while confirming it will continue purchasing GPUs from Nvidia and AMD. CEO Satya Nadella emphasized the company’s ongoing partnerships and the need to stay ahead in AI hardware. The Maia 200, designed for high‑performance AI model inference, will first be used by Microsoft’s Superintelligence team as they develop frontier models, and will also support OpenAI models on Azure. The move reflects a hybrid strategy of building in‑house chips while leveraging external suppliers. Read more →

China has granted conditional approval for the import of Nvidia's high-end AI GPUs, signaling a strategic move to support its major internet firms while protecting domestic semiconductor interests. The approvals arrived during Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's visit to Beijing, but strict licensing terms and restrictions on state-backed entities suggest a cautious approach. Chinese tech companies await future rounds of permission, and regulators are weighing the need for foreign chips against the goal of boosting local chip production. Read more →

Ricursive Intelligence, an artificial‑intelligence chip design startup founded by former Google researchers, announced a $300 million Series A funding round that values the company at $4 billion. Backed by Lightspeed and a roster of other venture firms, the round brings the startup’s total capital raised to $335 million. Ricursive’s technology uses reinforcement learning to autonomously create and refine silicon substrate layers, a process the founders say could accelerate AI chip development toward artificial general intelligence. Read more →

AI startup Humans& announced a $480 million seed financing at a $4.48 billion valuation. Backers include Nvidia, Jeff Bezos, SV Angel, GV and Emerson Collective. The company’s founders – former researchers from Anthropic, Google, xAI and a Stanford professor – aim to create AI that acts as collaborative “instant‑messaging”‑style software, emphasizing long‑horizon reinforcement learning, memory and multi‑agent interaction. Humans& plans to rethink model training at scale and user interaction to make AI a connective tissue for organizations and communities. Read more →

Skild AI, the robotics‑software startup founded in 2023, closed a $1.4 billion Series C financing round that pushes its valuation above $14 billion. The round was led by SoftBank with participation from Nvidia, Macquarie Group, 1789 Capital and others. The funding brings the company’s total capital raised to more than $2 billion. Skild AI develops general‑purpose foundation models for robots that can be retrofitted to many platforms and learn tasks by observing humans, aiming to cut the training burden that has limited robot adoption. Read more →

While large language models like ChatGPT and Gemini dominate today’s AI products, industry leaders are turning toward world models that encode the physical world’s laws, objects and movement. These models aim to power realistic video, surgical robots and self‑driving cars, forging a new era of "physical AI." Prominent figures such as Yann LeCun, Fei‑Fei Li and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang are championing spatial intelligence and synthetic data as the foundation for this shift. Read more →

Anthropic is set to secure a fresh $10 billion financing round that would lift its valuation to $350 billion, according to sources. The round is being led by Coatue Management and Singapore’s sovereign‑wealth fund GIC and is distinct from a separate $15 billion commitment from Nvidia and Microsoft. The new capital arrives as Anthropic rolls out Claude Code, a tool for automated coding, and eyes a potential initial public offering later this year, while rival OpenAI pursues its own massive fundraising effort. Read more →

Lightricks introduced an AI video model that runs locally on consumer devices, a rarity in the industry. Built with Nvidia technology and showcased at CES 2026, the model can generate 20‑second clips at 50 frames per second, supports 4K resolution and native audio, and is released as an open‑weight model on HuggingFace. On‑device operation gives creators control over their data, faster generation times of 1‑2 minutes per prompt, and reduced reliance on cloud services, addressing privacy and efficiency concerns for both independent filmmakers and large studios. Read more →

At CES 2026, Nvidia announced Alpamayo, a new family of open‑source AI models, simulation tools, and datasets designed to give autonomous vehicles human‑like reasoning capabilities. Central to the suite is Alpamayo 1, a 10 billion‑parameter vision‑language‑action model that breaks down driving problems into steps, evaluates possibilities, and selects the safest actions. The code is released on Hugging Face, and developers can fine‑tune it, create auto‑labeling systems, or combine real and synthetic data generated by Nvidia’s Cosmos world models. An open dataset of more than 1,700 hours of driving footage and the AlpaSim simulation framework are also available to accelerate safe, large‑scale testing. Read more →

Tech giants including OpenAI, Microsoft, Nvidia, Oracle, and Meta are pouring billions of dollars into new AI‑focused data centers. Partnerships such as the Stargate project promise up to $500 billion in future spending, while Microsoft alone targets $80 billion for AI‑enabled facilities. The rapid build‑out is driving unprecedented demand for power, water, and infrastructure, raising alarms about energy consumption, water use, and rising traffic incidents near construction sites. Executives like AMD’s Lisa Su dismiss worries, arguing demand far outweighs any potential oversupply. Read more →

The open‑weight large language model Qwen, developed by Alibaba, is rapidly gaining global traction. Its ease of download and modification has led to integration across a range of products, from smart glasses to vehicle dashboards, and adoption by companies such as Rokid, BYD, Airbnb, Perplexity, Nvidia, and even Meta. The model’s popularity contrasts with the lukewarm reception of recent U.S. releases like GPT‑5 and Llama 4, highlighting a shift toward openly shared AI research in China and a broader impact measured by real‑world usage rather than narrow benchmarks. Read more →

AI researchers are shifting focus from language‑only models to world models that predict how environments change in response to actions. By learning physical dynamics from video and sensor data, these systems aim to enable robots, autonomous vehicles, and other embodied agents to plan and reason before acting. Companies such as Nvidia, Google DeepMind, Meta, OpenAI, and emerging startups are advancing the technology, while challenges around compute, data collection, and safety remain. Read more →

Experts warn that the European Union could use its control of Dutch chip‑making equipment and stricter data‑privacy enforcement as a strategic lever against the United States. ASML’s monopoly on advanced lithography machines, vital for companies like Nvidia, gives Brussels the ability to restrict exports and influence the U.S. AI economy. Simultaneously, the EU’s push to enforce GDPR against firms such as Meta and Google could impede the data flows that power AI models. Analysts suggest that combined pressure on technology supply and data usage could destabilize the AI investment surge and create political challenges for President Trump. Read more →

Amazon is reportedly in preliminary discussions to invest as much as $10 billion in OpenAI, a deal that would see the AI lab using Amazon's AI chips. The potential agreement could value OpenAI at more than $500 billion. The move follows Amazon's earlier $8 billion investment in Anthropic and its recent launch of the Trainium chip series. OpenAI's shift to a for‑profit model has opened the door to new partnerships beyond its long‑time backer Microsoft. The proposed investment would add to a series of circular deals linking AI startups with hardware and cloud providers. Read more →

Amazon is in advanced discussions with OpenAI about a $10 billion investment that would also see the AI startup adopt Amazon's Trainium chips and increase its use of Amazon Web Services. The proposed deal could lift OpenAI's valuation past $500 billion while deepening the company's reliance on Amazon's cloud and hardware infrastructure. At the same time, OpenAI continues to expand relationships with other technology partners, including Microsoft, NVIDIA, Oracle and AMD, prompting investors to scrutinize the circular nature of its financing and compute arrangements. Read more →

Time magazine chose a collective of AI leaders—dubbed the ‘Architects of AI’—as its Person of the Year, highlighting the outsized influence of engineers, CEOs, and researchers from companies such as OpenAI, Nvidia, Google, Meta, and Anthropic. The selection underscores how artificial intelligence has moved from niche research to a daily fixture for millions, reshaping consumer habits, economic power, and geopolitical dynamics. Figures like Sam Altman and Jensen Huang are credited with building tools that now underpin everything from chat assistants to global chip strategies, marking AI as a central force in modern life. Read more →

Runway announced its new GWM-1 "world model" technology, asserting it can maintain coherent output for minutes at a time. The company framed the model as a step toward unifying diverse domains and action spaces under a single base system. While highlighting potential uses in film, television, advertising, robotics, physics and life‑science research, Runway also disclosed a partnership with CoreWeave that will employ Nvidia GB300 NVL72 racks for training and inference. The move positions Runway in a competitive AI arena where larger tech firms also pursue similar capabilities. Read more →

President Donald Trump announced that Nvidia has received White House approval to export its H200 AI GPU chips to "approved customers" in China and other nations. The deal includes a 25 percent U.S. cut of sales, higher than the 15 percent cut previously demanded. The H200 chips are an upgrade to the scaled‑down H20 models already allowed for export, though they remain less powerful than Nvidia's flagship Blackwell GPUs. Trump framed the policy as a boost for American jobs, manufacturing, and taxpayers, while noting that Nvidia’s U.S. customers are already moving forward with Blackwell chips. Senators have urged continued restrictions on China’s access to the most advanced AI chips. Read more →