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Lead
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Nvidia backs OpenAI's new data center with $105 billion
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Nvidia, OpenAI, and SB Energy are building an 8 gigawatt data center campus in Pike County, Ohio, with Nvidia agreeing to guarantee up to 105 billion dollars in financing to secure the land, power, and infrastructure. SB Energy will own and build the site, which OpenAI will then lease for 20 years, with the first 800 megawatts expected online by 2028. The number has moved around a lot: Nvidia originally discussed guaranteeing up to 250 billion dollars, cut that to under 120 billion, then landed on 105 billion when the deal was signed. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang pushed back hard against critics calling this "circular financing," insisting OpenAI will actually pay the lease and framing Nvidia's broader OpenAI relationship as worth roughly 600 billion dollars in compute purchases through 2030. This is worth watching closely, since it is one of the clearest live tests of whether the AI industry's spending is backed by real outside revenue or mostly AI companies funding each other's growth in a loop.
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Markets
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Stripe buys AI startup OpenRouter for over $7 billion
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Stripe has finalized a deal to acquire OpenRouter, a startup that lets developers switch between more than 400 AI models from over 60 companies through a single connection point, for more than 7 billion dollars. That price is over five times the 1.3 billion dollar valuation OpenRouter carried just three months ago after its last funding round. OpenRouter processes 200 trillion tokens a month and serves more than 10 million users, and its CEO has openly compared the company to Stripe itself, giving businesses one place to pay for AI the same way Stripe gives them one place to accept payments. Folding OpenRouter directly into Stripe's existing payments infrastructure means Stripe now sits at both the money layer and the AI model layer of a huge and growing chunk of the internet's software, a genuinely significant consolidation in how AI gets bought and paid for behind the scenes.
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AI Race
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Anthropic just beat OpenAI in revenue for the first time
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Anthropic told prospective investors its second quarter revenue topped 11.5 billion dollars, more than doubling its first quarter total of 4.73 billion and up over 14 times from just 787 million a year earlier. That put Anthropic ahead of OpenAI in quarterly revenue for the first time, since OpenAI reported 6.7 billion dollars for the same period, with its operating loss actually widening to 12.3 billion dollars. Anthropic, by contrast, posted its first ever positive adjusted operating income this quarter, a genuinely rare milestone among frontier AI labs still burning enormous amounts of cash. Much of this growth traces back to businesses adopting Claude for coding and other professional work rather than casual chat use. The figures are still preliminary and could be revised, and they arrive as Anthropic works with Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan on what could become one of the largest AI IPOs to date.
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Creator Economy
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AI video startup Higgsfield quadruples to $5.4B
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AI video platform Higgsfield raised 400 million dollars at a 5.4 billion dollar valuation, more than four times what it was worth just eight months ago, with Goldman Sachs and Intel joining as new investors. The company's annualized revenue jumped from 20 million dollars a year ago to 700 million dollars today, and the real story behind that growth is a pivot: business customers now make up most of Higgsfield's revenue, up from less than a quarter in January, as brands like Dollar Shave Club use it to batch-produce marketing videos daily instead of relying on outside creative agencies. This stands in sharp contrast to OpenAI shutting down its own Sora video app earlier this year after it burned through an estimated 15 million dollars a day in computing costs against barely any revenue. If you make video content for brands or social teams, this is a clear signal that AI video tools are becoming standard business infrastructure rather than a novelty, and skills in directing and editing that output are becoming genuinely marketable.
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That's it for today. See you tomorrow.
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Ternautics Media
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