| |  | Aug 22, 2025 | | | | | Supported by |  | | | | | | TGIF! Anthropic is in talks to raise as much as $10 billion. Meta Platform signs a $10 billion-plus cloud deal with Google. Nvidia tells some suppliers to suspend the production of H20 chips for China.
| | | | Anthropic is in talks to raise as much as $10 billion, double the amount it was previously seeking, according to two people with knowledge of the matter. The company has been in fundraising discussions with investors for raising at a $170 billion valuation, up from a $58 billion-valued round that closed at the beginning of this year. The company is discussing increasing its round size after receiving more investor demand. Investors in the current round include Iconiq Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Menlo Ventures. QIA is also in discussions about joining the round. The artificial intelligence startup closed the first tranche of the new funding last week and is expected to complete the round by the end of the month, according to one of those people.. Bloomberg earlier reported details of the round. | | | | Google has struck a major cloud computing deal with Meta Platforms, The Information reported. As part of the agreement, the social media giant will use Google Cloud's servers, storage, networking and other services. The deal—worth more than $10 billion over six years—is one of the largest known agreements that Google Cloud has made in the unit's 17-year history. It comes after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in July said his company would spend "hundreds of billions of dollars" on expanding its computing capacity to enable its ambitions in artificial intelligence. For years, Meta has run its social media apps and other services using its own data centers, as well as cloud servers rented from Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. Google's deal with Meta, which also includes access to Nvidia's graphics processing units running in Google's data centers, is the latest example of the search juggernaut's ability to strike cloud deals with even its fiercest competitors. Earlier this year, OpenAI signed a cloud computing agreement with Google, which is investing heavily in AI to rival that of the ChatGPT maker. | | | | Nvidia has told some of its component suppliers to suspend production work related to the H20, its chip tailor-made for the Chinese market, The Information reported. The directive comes weeks after the Chinese government told local tech companies to stop buying the chips due to alleged security concerns. The production halt signals that despite the Trump administration's decision to allow Nvidia to resume selling the chips after a monthslong ban, the chip giant's hopes of maintaining its foothold in the Chinese market remain in limbo—now because of the Chinese government's policies. | | | | Crusoe, the developer of a massive OpenAI data center in Abilene, Texas, has been talking to investors about raising at least $1 billion at a $10 billion valuation, or more than three times its last valuation fetched late last year, The Information reported on Thursday. The firm wants to use the money to support its growing ambitions to provide cloud computing services alongside data center development. It has told investors that revenue should rise to $500 million this year and $2.2 billion next year, boosted by revenue from renting out artificial intelligence chips to developers. Also Thursday, The Information also reported that Crusoe bought a 25-person cloud computing startup based in Tel Aviv, which develops software to improve the utilization and efficiency of graphics processing units. Crusoe later confirmed the deal but the terms were not disclosed. | | | | President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday establishing a "national design studio" that will focus on improving government websites and physical spaces and plans to appoint Joe Gebbia, Airbnb's co-founder, to oversee it, Bloomberg reported. Trump will appoint Gebbia to be the chief design officer of the studio. According to Trump's order, that role will involve recruiting creative talent and coordinating with government departments and agencies to "devise innovative solutions." The studio is part of a "national initiative to improve experiences for Americans, starting by breathing new life into the design of sites where people interface with their government," the order says. "It is time to update the government's design language to be both usable and beautiful." Prior to his new role, Gebbia was working with the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, to help improve the paper-based retirement process for federal employees. | | | | Elon Musk talked with Mark Zuckerberg about Meta Platforms potentially backing Musk's $97 billion bid for OpenAI's assets, according to a legal filing. While Meta and Zuckerberg did not sign onto Musk's bid, Musk said that he had communicated about "potential financing arrangements or investments" with Zuckerberg, in response to a legal request from OpenAI's lawyers. The legal filing was part of Musk's breach of charitable trust lawsuit against OpenAI. OpenAI has countersued Musk arguing that his bid interfered with OpenAI's business relationships and violated California law against unfair competition. OpenAI's lawyers are asking the court overseeing the lawsuit to force Meta to produce documents related to those communications and discussions about OpenAI's planned restructuring, which is central to the case. Meta previously wrote a letter to the California Attorney General arguing that allowing OpenAI to restructure to a primarily for-profit business after raising tax-free donations as a charity would set a bad precedent for startups. Meta argues that OpenAI is seeking documents that are not relevant to the lawsuit, as well as documents that OpenAI could obtain from Musk instead. | | | | Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy isn't impressed that archrival Databricks, which is privately held, is raising a new funding round from existing investors at a valuation of more than $100 billion. In a companywide email, Ramaswamy said Wednesday that Databricks' announcement was "designed to make headlines" and said its private valuation can't be fairly compared to that of Snowflake, which went public five years ago next month. "Private company valuations (especially small rounds done entirely by insiders) are negotiated behind closed doors, often with terms that inflate the headline number," he said in the email. Snowflake, which reports its second-quarter earnings Aug. 27, currently has a market capitalization of around $65 billion. Databricks spokespeople weren't immediately available for comment. Snowflake and Databricks have an intense rivalry in cloud database services and enterprise AI products. On more than one occasion, the firms have also considered buying the same startups. | | | | OpenAI has been quietly using Google search data to power results in ChatGPT, which aims to replace Google's search engine among consumers and businesses, The Information reported. OpenAI uses data from SerpApi, which scrapes Google search results, according to the report. SerpApi has listed other firms that develop search products, including Apple, Meta Platforms and Perplexity, as customers. Google executives have expressed frustration about SerpApi and tried various techniques to stymie its ability to obtain search data. A federal judge could move to force Google to directly share search index data with such rivals. | | | | Rent the Runway CEO and cofounder Jennifer Hyman is turning over control of the clothing-rental firm to its longtime lender and a group of other investors, the company said Thursday. In exchange, the company is cutting its heavy debt load. Shares closed more than 25% higher on Thursday following the announcement. Aranda Principal Strategies, the company's longtime lender, will take control of roughly 86% of the company's shares, prior to a new incentive plan for executives and a rights offering for existing shareholders. As part of the deal, more than $240 million in debt will be converted into equity while the repayment on the remaining $120 million in debt will be extended to 2029. Hyman's supervoting stock, which gave her a 20% vote despite only owning 3.6% of the outstanding shares, is being converted to ordinary voting stock. She will grant a proxy on her vote to the investors. The investors, including Aranda and private equity firms Story3 Capital Partners and Nexus Capital Management, will also put an additional $20 million in cash into the company. Rent the Runway has struggled to regain its footing following the pandemic, when demand for its rental workwear and event attire cratered due to lockdown orders. Subscriber growth has been uneven since, and the company has had to balance its large debt burden with a need to constantly purchase new inventory and keep up with trends. There are signs the company's turnaround is trending in the right direction: it has moved to a model where it doesn't pay for most of the clothes it offers up front, which has helped cut costs, and ended its most recent quarter with 147,000 active subscribers, an all-time high, and its highest customer retention rate in four years. | | | | Japanese financial services conglomerate SBI Holdings is teaming up with Singapore blockchain firm Startale Group to build a new trading platform for tokenized stocks—digital assets backed by shares in publicly traded companies. Tokyo-based SBI, which oversees more than 11 trillion yen ($74 billion) in assets, said Friday that its new joint venture with Startale will launch a trading platform focused on tokenized stocks, which are blockchain-backed tokens that represent the value of public company shares. Their joint venture comes amid growing popularity of tokenized stocks around the world, especially among crypto traders outside the U.S. who don't have easy access to U.S. equities. In June, Backed Finance, a fast-growing provider of tokenized assets, launched a tokenized U.S. equities product called xStocks for users outside the U.S. | | | | | Popular articles
By Natasha Mascarenhas, Kalley Huang and Valida Pau
By Kalley Huang and Erin Woo
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