News linked to both this project and an event.
Odaily reports: AI chip startup Etched has completed a roughly $800 million funding round, with investors including quantitative trading giant Jane Street and a venture capital firm affiliated with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). The company is currently testing its AI inference chip product and plans to begin shipping to select customers this summer. It has also signed sales contracts totaling approximately $1 billion, though specific customers were not disclosed.Founded in 2022, the company positions itself as a potential competitor to NVIDIA in the field of AI computing chips, focusing on designing customized chip architectures for large model inference scenarios. It is collaborating with TSMC to develop "low-voltage inference" technology aimed at reducing energy consumption and heat dissipation pressure.This funding round, previously reported to have a valuation of around $500 million, includes participation from Stripes, funds associated with Peter Thiel, and several quantitative firms. Jane Street is said to have invested over $100 million in total, with subsequent additional contributions. (Bloomberg)
according to on-chain analyst Ai Yi's monitoring, on June 29, SHAZ announced the completion of a $1.6 billion financing to support a six-year strategic partnership with NVIDIA; 11 hours ago, Leopold Aschenbrenner's fund disclosed a new 19.9% stake in SHAZ. The former saw a gain of 1.45%, while the latter climbed 14% after-hours. The SEC requires funds to submit public reports when their holdings exceed 5%.
cloud computing startup Runpod has announced the completion of a $100 million funding round and stated it has rejected multiple acquisition offers. Specific investor information has not yet been disclosed. The company focuses on providing GPU computing power rental services for developers, supporting open-source models and AI application deployment. Currently, this sector generally relies on NVIDIA GPU servers for computing resources. As AI applications expand, market demand for low-cost, highly flexible computing infrastructure continues to rise, driving up both the valuations and funding activity of cloud service providers like Runpod. (The Information)
According to CNBC, after listing on the Nasdaq at an approximate valuation of $2.6 trillion, SpaceX quickly became the world’s fifth-largest publicly traded company and entered a market-cap ranking race with Amazon. However, pricing in the options market suggests it may take considerable time for SpaceX to climb into the global top three—or even claim the No. 1 spot. Currently, SpaceX’s market capitalization remains significantly below that of third-place Alphabet and second-place Apple—both valued above $4.4 trillion. To overtake them and become the world’s second-largest company by market cap (just behind NVIDIA), SpaceX’s stock price would need to rise roughly 70% to $340 per share. Based on implied probability models derived from options-market pricing, the likelihood that SpaceX reaches this target price before July 2028 stands at approximately 50%. If the goal is to become the world’s largest company by market cap—surpassing NVIDIA—the options market assigns a roughly 38% probability of achieving this by June 2028, rising to about 41% by year-end 2028. Analysts note that options prices reflect the collective market expectation regarding future trajectories. Higher-strike options carry an elevated uncertainty premium, indicating that—even though SpaceX possesses a compelling long-term growth narrative—reaching the pinnacle of market capitalization is still viewed as a high-difficulty, long-duration endeavor.
Sharon AI has announced the issuance of convertible senior notes to raise $700 million, with the proceeds intended to support its computing agreement with NVIDIA.
Sharon AI Holdings, a Nasdaq-listed company, announced a six-year strategic computing cooperation agreement with NVIDIA to jointly expand AI infrastructure capabilities in Australia.Under the agreement, the two parties will collaborate to build approximately 72MW of data center computing capacity and deploy infrastructure based on the NVIDIA DSX AI Factory architecture. The plan is to gradually scale up to 40,000 Grace Blackwell GB300 GPUs to meet the computing needs of AI startups, enterprise clients, and research institutions.The cooperation model adopts a structure combining revenue generation with credit support: Sharon AI will be responsible for selling cloud services based on NVIDIA's computing power, while NVIDIA, upon receiving hardware and basic product revenue, will also participate in a share of cloud service revenue, forming a sustainable "usage-driven revenue model."Sharon AI stated that this collaboration will significantly enhance its capital efficiency, enabling it to expand AI infrastructure capabilities without relying on traditional heavy-asset financing and accelerate the deployment of "sovereign AI computing power" in Australia. With this partnership, Sharon AI's total AI factory capacity will increase to 132MW, of which approximately 102MW is already contracted by clients. The company expects to deploy over 55,000 NVIDIA GPUs by mid-2027. (Businesswire)
OpenRouter, an AI model aggregation platform founded by OpenSea co-founder Alex Atallah, has announced the completion of a $113 million Series B funding round, led by CapitalG, the growth fund under Alphabet, Google's parent company.Other participants in this funding round include a16z, Menlo Ventures, NVentures (affiliated with NVIDIA), as well as ServiceNow, MongoDB, Snowflake, and Databricks. The company's valuation has now exceeded $1 billion.
AI hardware startup Hark announced the completion of a $700 million funding round, reaching a post-investment valuation of $6 billion. This Series A round was led by Parkway Venture Capital, with participation from NVIDIA, AMD Ventures, ARK Invest, Brookfield, Greycroft, Intel Capital, Qualcomm Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, and others. The new funds will be used to expand GPU infrastructure and accelerate large model research and development. (Bloomberg)
AI startup Hark announced it has raised $700 million in funding, achieving a post-money valuation of $6 billion. This Series A round was led by Parkway Venture Capital, with participation from NVIDIA, AMD Ventures, ARK Invest, Brookfield, Greycroft, Intel Capital, Qualcomm Ventures, and Salesforce Ventures.
amidst the US earnings season and the continuous advancement of AI narratives by tech giants, according to official sources from Bitget, the platform has recently added 10 new US stock contract targets. As a result, Bitget's Universal Exchange (UEX) now supports 263 US stock tokens and 81 US stock contracts. The total number of US stock-related assets tradable across the entire platform has exceeded 340.This week enters a period of密集 earnings reports and macroeconomic data releases. Through continuous expansion, Bitget aims to provide users with a wide range of cross-market asset allocation channels.3 Key Focus Targets This Week:• NVDA (NVIDIA): Will release Q1 earnings after the US market closes on May 20. The implied volatility from the options market suggests a potential single-day swing of over 7.5%. As the core of AI computing power, its performance will directly impact the overall valuation trend of the tech sector.• GOOGL (Google): Recently, at its I/O conference, Google intensively released multiple new products such as Gemini 3.5 and AI agents. The market is closely monitoring the subsequent pace of commercial implementation and revenue monetization capabilities.• WMT (Walmart): Will release Q1 earnings before the market opens on May 21. As a retail giant, Walmart's resilience during the consumer downturn cycle is under significant scrutiny. The earnings results and guidance will directly influence investors' assessment of full-year growth expectations and the stock's short-term performance.
According to the official announcement, the second asset launched on Bitget IPO Prime is preOPAI—a digital token issued by the regulated issuer Republic on the Solana blockchain, designed to mirror OpenAI’s post-IPO economic performance on a 1:1 basis. As the world’s leading consumer AI provider, OpenAI reports approximately 900 million weekly active users, according to official data. Its most recent funding round raised $122 billion, with participants including Microsoft, NVIDIA, Amazon, and SoftBank. Bitget IPO Prime operates on a subscription model, whereby users receive subscription quotas based on their account tier. Upon completion of token allocation, users may trade the tokens on the upcoming spot market. Alternatively, after the lock-up period for preOPAI’s underlying debt assets expires, the issuer will authorize Bitget to convert users’ holdings into either stock tokens or USDT, referencing the underlying company’s (OpenAI’s) publicly traded stock price. IPO Prime Details: • OpenAI Implied Valuation: $898.21 billion • Total IPO Prime Subscriptions: 29,082 • Total Subscription Value: $21,084,450 • Subscription Price: 1 preOPAI = $725 • Accepted Subscription Currencies: USDT or USDGO • Total Subscription Pool Cap: $300,000,000
According to TechCrunch, AI-powered coding startup Cursor is nearing completion of a new funding round of at least $2 billion, with a post-money valuation of approximately $50 billion—nearly doubling its $29.3 billion valuation from six months ago. The round is co-led by existing investors Thrive Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, with Battery Ventures and strategic investor NVIDIA also expected to participate. The round has already been oversubscribed, though final terms have not yet been finalized. On the performance front, Cursor projects its annualized revenue to exceed $6 billion by the end of 2026—representing at least a threefold increase over the $2 billion annualized revenue it disclosed in February this year. Regarding profitability, the company achieved a slight positive gross margin overall after launching its in-house Composer model in November last year and incorporating lower-cost third-party models (e.g., Kimi from China). Its enterprise business has already reached gross-margin profitability, while its individual developer accounts remain unprofitable.
Sam Dare, founder of Covenant AI, announced that Covenant AI has officially exited the Bittensor network. Previously, Covenant AI completed the largest decentralized LLM pretraining project in history—Covenant-72B (a 72-billion-parameter model developed by over 70 independent contributors)—which drew attention from NVIDIA’s CEO and was cited by an Anthropic co-founder. In its statement, Covenant AI accused the Bittensor network of long concentrating actual control in the hands of co-founder Jacob Steeves (“Const”), rendering the so-called “three-signature multisig governance” merely a theatrical performance of decentralization, with real power never truly distributed. Recently, Jacob Steeves unilaterally imposed punitive measures against Covenant AI, including: suspending its subnet earnings, revoking its community channel moderation privileges, unilaterally deprecating its subnet infrastructure, and exerting economic pressure via large-scale token dumping during the ongoing conflict between the two parties. Covenant AI stated it cannot continue fundraising, recruiting talent, or soliciting community resources on a network where the promise of “decentralization” can be unilaterally revoked by a single individual. Its research outcomes, team, and models will depart alongside the team, and a new project—including related progress—will be publicly announced shortly.
According to The Block, AlphaTON Capital has announced plans to raise $43 million through a strategic partnership with Vertical Data Inc. to expand its AI compute infrastructure; the transaction is expected to close in Q2 2026. AlphaTON CEO Brittany Kaiser stated that the funding will be used to deploy additional NVIDIA B300 GPUs, with the core objective of advancing the convergence of AI, digital assets, and confidential computing—and scaling up the platform’s overall compute capacity. On the business front, AlphaTON not only holds a substantial amount of TON tokens as corporate treasury assets but also actively participates in building infrastructure for the Telegram and TON ecosystems, with key investment focus areas including Cocoon, Telegram’s decentralized AI platform. Background-wise, AlphaTON was formed through the restructuring and transformation of former biotech public company Portage Biotech Inc., which had previously focused on cancer therapy research; the company completed the spin-off of its cancer therapy subsidiary in February this year.
AlphaTON Capital (NASDAQ: ATON) announced a strategic AI hardware and financing agreement with Vertical Data Inc., with a total transaction value of approximately $43 million, expected to close in Q2 2026. The agreement centers on deploying high-performance GPU clusters powered by NVIDIA’s B300 architecture. Financing will be provided through Vertical Data’s GPUfinancing.com platform via an asset-backed, non-recourse structure and includes managed infrastructure services. This expansion will support AlphaTON’s business initiatives with partners including Telegram, Gamee, Animoca Brands, and Midnight Blockchain.