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Databricks $190B, DeepSeek's 1,100% Price Flip & Defense VC Goes Institutional
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Databricks closes a record $5B AI infrastructure round as DeepSeek reverses course with an 1,100% API price hike — two signals pointing in opposite directions. Plus defense VC hits institutional scale, fusion capital concentrates, and 40 new unicorns mask a narrowing market.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Databricks just closed a five billion dollar raise at a hundred and ninety billion dollar valuation. That's the largest AI infrastructure round on record, and it tells you something precise about where enterprise budgets are actually going right now.
The pricing story running alongside that is worth close attention. DeepSeek, which spent most of this year positioned as the low-cost disruptor to US AI leaders, just raised its API pricing eleven hundred percent on premium workloads.
Defense tech is moving fast and the capital is getting serious. Neros raised two hundred and fifty million dollars in a Series C for military drones.
Commonwealth Fusion Systems now has three point nine four billion dollars in total private capital raised, including a one billion dollar close in July. That's roughly one-third of all private fusion funding globally.
July produced forty new unicorns. The highest monthly rate in four years.
Pony.ai and Uber are deploying two thousand plus robotaxis across five European cities. That's the transition from pilot program to fleet operation.
The number to hold onto heading into the next few days is one point five trillion dollars. That's the estimate of Big Tech's long-term contractual compute obligations, not the capex figures you see in earnings guidance.
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