News linked to both this project and an event.
Odaily Report: Canadian AI model startup Cohere is conducting a large-scale funding round, with a valuation of $20.5 billion, roughly tripling from a year ago. Cohere said on Thursday that it has completed the first tranche of this funding round, with total funding expected to reach up to $5 billion. The company stated that it has received investment commitments from investors including the Canadian government and NVIDIA, in addition to the $600 million investment previously disclosed by European retail giant Schwarz Group. Among them, the Canadian government has agreed to invest up to $1.14 billion in Cohere.Canadian Prime Minister Carney stated that Cohere plans to keep its headquarters in Canada and is expected to build new computing infrastructure in the country by 2030, with an investment of approximately $1.2 billion. If this funding round is successfully completed, it will become the largest private fundraising in Canadian history, far exceeding previous records. Cohere declined to disclose how much of the $5 billion funding target has been finalized, but the Chief Financial Officer said the first tranche has covered "the majority" of it. This valuation does not include the funds raised in this round. (Bloomberg)
Odaily reports: AI compute startup General Compute has completed a $100 million Series A funding round, led by Blackbird Ventures and Abstract Ventures, with a post-money valuation of $800 million, a significant increase from the $60 million valuation after its seed round in May this year. The funding was driven by an order from a large customer with $100 million in annual recurring revenue.General Compute focuses on AI inference compute, using specialized chips from NVIDIA competitors, and has reached a $400 million chip procurement agreement with SambaNova, with suppliers also including Positron and Cerebras. Unlike the traditional approach of building large data centers, the company deploys AI compute by leasing data center space, utilizing smaller-scale power resources, and retrofitting Bitcoin mining farms, with plans to deploy 75 megawatts of compute capacity by 2027. Amid CoreWeave's stock falling to near a 12-month low and Elon Musk's prediction that more than 200 new cloud service providers will undergo elimination and consolidation, General Compute co-founder and CEO Finn Puklowski believes that market fears of a chip-induced industry collapse are severely exaggerated, and customer demand for various chips and compute remains strong.PANews, October 27: According to reports, AI compute startup General Compute has completed a $100 million Series A funding round, led by Blackbird Ventures and Abstract Ventures, with a post-money valuation of $800 million, a significant increase from the $60 million valuation after its seed round in May this year. Currently, General Compute focuses on AI inference compute, using specialized chips from NVIDIA competitors, and has reached a $400 million chip procurement agreement with SambaNova, with suppliers also including Positron and Cerebras. (TechCrunch)
According to TechCrunch, NVIDIA participated in the $14 million Series B financing round for Indian startup Simplismart, which was led by Dallas Venture Capital with participation from Accel, Shastra VC, and Micromax. The transaction values the four-year-old company at approximately $100 million, including the new investment. Simplismart states that its software sits between AI models and compute infrastructure, automatically adjusting model deployment and management to optimize response time, request throughput, and compute utilization, enabling customers to better leverage their existing GPU resources. The company noted that its software helped AI video generation platform InVideo reduce GPU service costs by 56%. Simplismart CEO Amritanshu Jain told TechCrunch that the company’s annualized revenue run rate grew 14 times over the past six months to reach an eight-figure amount. This figure is based on recent customer usage rather than contractual recurring revenue, and excludes revenue passed through to infrastructure providers. Although the company serves more customers in India, the United States accounts for more than half of its total revenue.
According to Yonhap News Agency, NAVER announced on October 27 that it has signed a computing infrastructure contract worth approximately $9 billion (around 12 trillion Korean won) with global asset manager Brookfield, satisfying the prerequisites for NVIDIA's strategic investment. The process for NVIDIA to subscribe to $1 billion (approximately 1.3 trillion won) in new shares through a third-party placement is expected to be completed in the near term, upon which it will become NAVER's third-largest shareholder. This contract is part of the $10 billion global AI factory project announced by the three parties in July. Under their agreed division of labor, NAVER will oversee operations, NVIDIA will provide technical collaboration for next-generation high-performance computing platforms such as the DSX, and Brookfield will handle infrastructure financing. As a result, NAVER will not need to directly bear the substantial capital expenditures associated with data center construction and GPU procurement, allowing it to focus on AI infrastructure operations and customer acquisition.
US construction robotics startup Bedrock Robotics announced the completion of a $600 million Series C funding round, bringing its post-money valuation to $4.1 billion, a significant increase from the $1.75 billion valuation at its financing in February this year, as cumulative funding approaches $1 billion. The round was co-led by CapitalG and Emergence Capital, with participation from Valor Equity Partners, 8VC, NVIDIA's venture capital arm NVentures, Eclipse, Georgian, Perry Creek Capital, Temasek, and others.
According to the UK's Financial Times, NVIDIA-backed AI cloud provider CoreWeave is seeking to tap into insurers' vast pools of capital to reduce its financing costs for purchasing AI chips and building infrastructure. Brandon McBride, CoreWeave's co-founder and head of financing, stated that if the company can secure investment-grade ratings for more of its chip-backed debt and ultimately improve its own credit rating, it will have the opportunity to enter the insurance capital market. He noted that the insurance industry's capital base is "almost infinite," because "all the money sitting in insurance capital pools represents one of the largest funding sources in the world."
NVIDIA and SoftBank have each completed the final $10 billion investment from their respective $30 billion commitments to OpenAI's last funding round.
OpenAI launches the GPT-6.1 Sol model and Dots autonomous agents, with annual recurring revenue nearing $70 billion. Meanwhile, NVIDIA seeks insurers to help share financing risks for AI chips, while India plans to invest $25 billion to support domestic deep tech startups.
Odaily — The financing will be used to support an undisclosed borrower in deploying 32 NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 systems in British Columbia, Canada. USD.AI is an on-chain lending protocol.
According to TechCrunch, AI infrastructure company Cornelis announced the completion of a $205 million funding round led by IAG Capital Partners. The company also launched Active Compute Fabric networking technology, designed to improve communication efficiency between AI chips and reduce GPU idle time caused by waiting for data transmission.
According to Business Insider, Seattle-based artificial intelligence company Nuance has announced the completion of a $50 million Series A funding round, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Accel, NVIDIA's NVentures, South Park Commons, and Define Ventures. Founded last year by three former Apple researchers, Nuance aims to develop multimodal AI models with enhanced emotional understanding capabilities. The company completed a $10 million seed round led by Accel in July of last year.
Reuters reported that Anthropic is seeking to raise $100 billion, aiming to set an IPO record, with a valuation potentially reaching $2 trillion. Nvidia is considering participating in a $10 billion investment.
Anthropic is in talks with NVIDIA to bring it on as an anchor investor for its IPO, aiming to raise up to $100 billion and potentially reaching a valuation of $2 trillion. NVIDIA is expected to invest up to $10 billion, with the plans still under discussion.
According to Forbes, Andreessen Horowitz and Accel co-led Cognition, an AI coding agent company, in a Series E funding round of more than $2 billion, pushing its latest valuation to $48 billion, a substantial increase from the $26 billion valuation four months prior. Over 30 other institutions, including Founders Fund, General Catalyst, Avenir, and NVIDIA, participated in the round. Operating revenue for Cognition’s AI coding agent product Devin has grown from $492 million in May to nearly $900 million, with The Information forecasting that its annualized revenue could reach $4 billion to $5 billion by year-end.
According to Reuters, AI data center optical interconnect company iPronics announced the completion of a $125 million Series B financing round, co-led by Maverick Silicon and Light Street Capital, with participation from NVIDIA, Triatomic Capital, Bosch Ventures, Catalight Capital, the European Innovation Council Fund, and others, bringing the company's total funding to $177 million. iPronics primarily provides rack-mounted optical switching equipment for AI infrastructure. Through its programmable optical layer, it enables AI clusters to dynamically adjust network connections in real time according to training and inference workloads. The new capital will be used to scale operations and accelerate commercial deployment.
According to Chaohiang Research, JPMorgan's September 2 investor meeting minutes for NVIDIA indicate that NVIDIA is "comfortable" with its guidance for 70% year-over-year growth in FY28, and this guidance is supply-constrained rather than demand-constrained; with sufficient supply, the business could grow more than double. Inference has become the largest and expanding segment of the data center business. Eighteen months ago, inference and training each accounted for roughly half, but currently inference exceeds training and will continue to rise. Advanced wafers and memory are the two major supply bottlenecks, and NVIDIA maintains close cooperation with TSMC and the three major memory suppliers. The customer base continues to broaden, with OpenAI and Anthropic currently accounting for approximately 20% of end-user demand, which may approach 25% by FY28; new cloud providers now account for over 50% of AI computing infrastructure. Open-source and closed-source models will coexist, and gross margins for model developers are improving. NVIDIA supports long-term demand through revenue sharing, the PORTS-Pike campus, and a $500 billion private capital financing platform. Morgan Stanley maintains an Overweight rating with a price target of $320, based on approximately 20x the expected CY2026 EPS of $15.87.
According to Bloomberg, a fund under Blue Owl Capital led a $2.4 billion debt financing to support cloud computing provider Iren’s purchase of Nvidia Blackwell Ultra GPUs for its Canadian data center campus. The financing consists of a $1.2 billion senior secured term loan and an equal amount of senior secured notes, with a structure that allows Iren to procure the equipment in phases over a set period. Pacific Investment Management Company is also one of the guarantors for the financing. Documents show the facility carries a 9% interest rate and has a tenor of two and a half years.
据 BeInCrypto 报道,“大空头”投资人 Michael Burry 在英伟达公布财报前增持其空头头寸,同时买入于今年 12 月到期、行权价位于 200 美元中高区间的英伟达看涨期权作为对冲。Michael Burry 表示,该期权并非押注股价上涨,其成本可由现有空头及看跌期权仓位覆盖。 Michael Burry 认为,英伟达的低市盈率可能掩盖了其短期垄断地位带来的估值风险,其自身测算的理论价值显著低于当前市价;同时,他担忧公司将持续扩大资本开支,可能在 AI 投资周期见顶后面临盈利下修压力。除英伟达外,Michael Burry 还新建或加码做空甲骨文、Palantir、Nebius 和 Caterpillar,其股票空头仓位已占投资组合逾 21%(不含看跌期权)。
According to Tide Research, Goldman Sachs' August 26 quick commentary highlighted that NVIDIA reported Q2 revenue of $96.2 billion, beating Goldman's forecast by 3.4% and market consensus by 4.2%; data center revenue reached $89.0 billion, outpacing estimates by 2.9% and consensus by 3.6%; EPS came in at $2.22, surpassing expectations by 4.9% and consensus by 6.1%; and gross margin was 75.0%, in line with projections. The midpoint of Q3 revenue guidance stands at $108.0 billion, reflecting 14% QoQ growth and approximately 90% YoY growth, exceeding the market consensus of $105.4 billion but slightly falling short of Goldman's estimate of $110.7 billion. Gross margin guidance is set at 74.0%, slightly below the anticipated 74.9%. Goldman Sachs retains a Buy rating with a $285 price target, offering 34% upside from current levels, though it expects the stock to trade in a range post-earnings, as market optimism has already been fully absorbed following hyperscalers' capex upgrades. The Q3 gross margin guidance misses market expectations by roughly 90 basis points, mainly due to elevated initial ramp-up costs for the new Blackwell architecture GPUs. Goldman asserts that three key discussion points from the earnings call—the upside potential for the $1 trillion cumulative data center revenue target, the structure of the $500 billion financing facility, and the gross margin trajectory in H2 2026 and 2027—are more critical than the earnings figures themselves. Robust guidance underscores the resilience of AI spending, making digital semiconductors such as Broadcom, AMD, Marvell, ARM, and Intel the most...
According to Chaoxiang Research, a Morgan Stanley report dated August 24 indicates that the total disclosed off-balance-sheet commitments from hyperscalers, NVIDIA, and Broadcom have surpassed $3.1 trillion. Lease commitments total $1.1 trillion and procurement commitments $1.7 trillion, while the combined on-balance-sheet debt and lease liabilities of hyperscalers reach $770 billion. Amazon and Google's free cash flow turned negative in Q2 2026, with Meta expected to follow suit next quarter. Financing instruments are restructuring the AI compute capital structure across six dimensions: off-balance-sheet lease and procurement commitments form the first financing layer; the share of debt issuance rises from 2% in 2025 to 19% in 2026; Google frees up $110 billion by reducing share buybacks and issuing equity; Oracle records $4.6 billion in customer advance payments in Q2; and Broadcom and NVIDIA launch chip-leasing SPVs to support unrated AI labs. Morgan Stanley notes that when the financing structure itself becomes a core variable in the AI supply chain, tracking changes in off-balance-sheet commitments and accounting judgments is nearing the importance of tracking chip shipments themselves.