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Crusoe $30B, Nvidia Buys Hugging Face & August's $42B Surge
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
AI infrastructure financing hit escape velocity in August — Crusoe tripled to a $30B valuation, Databricks locked in $190B, and Nvidia acquired Hugging Face for $12.9B. Six stories that reveal where venture capital is concentrating and why early-stage founders face a colder market than the headlines suggest.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Crusoe just tripled its valuation in ten months. The AI data-center company closed a round valuing it at thirty billion dollars, up from ten billion in October.
Gimlet Labs is making a related but distinct bet. The company raised three hundred million dollars at a three-billion-dollar valuation, led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Arm and Microsoft M12 also participating.
Databricks extended its own run in August, closing five billion dollars at a hundred and ninety billion dollar valuation. That's fifty-six billion in valuation gains across six months.
August closed with seven companies completing rounds of one billion dollars or more. That ties for the year's second-highest monthly count, behind July's thirteen.
Below the mega-deal layer, there's a clear pattern in where smaller checks are going. Zeit AI raised five million at seed.
One deal that deserves attention beyond its price tag: Nvidia announced its acquisition of Hugging Face for twelve-point-nine billion dollars. Hugging Face is the primary open-source hub for AI models and tooling, used by hundreds of thousands of developers globally.
A few things to track from here. First, whether infrastructure financing structures continue to replicate energy and telecom models, or whether that discipline holds only while contracted demand remains strong.
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