Weekly AI Update The AI chip gold rush has a new banker worth $2.4B Volta Infra, a brand new AI cloud startup, just raised $300 million plus $5 billion in financing to help more companies afford Nvidia's pricey chips, not just the tech giants. Backed by Nvidia, Michael Dell, Andreessen Horowitz, and Altimeter, it has already locked in a $10 billion contract to supply cloud capacity to an unnamed AI developer over six years. The bet is that whoever solves AI's financing problem wins, though critics warn of risky circular deals and a coming shakeout. Google's $1.5B play for Mechanize could finally fix its coding AI problem Google is reportedly in talks to pay around $1.5 billion to license technology from Mechanize, a young AI startup building simulated environments and benchmarks to train coding agents, while also hiring some of its top evaluation experts. The move fits a familiar Google playbook of striking talent and licensing deals that sidestep antitrust scrutiny, much like its earlier tie-ups with Windsurf and The goal is clear: close the gap with Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex, which have pulled ahead in the fast growing market for AI coding tools. Anthropic wants to build its own chips to run Claude faster and cheaper Anthropic confirmed it is assembling a custom silicon team to design its own AI chips, hiring engineers who will develop hardware and models together so Claude can run faster and at greater scale. The move puts it alongside OpenAI, Google, and Meta, all of which have pushed into custom chips, though building an advanced one can cost close to half a billion dollars. It is the latest piece of a massive infrastructure push that also includes a $15 billion Texas data center campus and deals with $AMZN, $NVDA, $AMD, and Samsung.

Chinese AI startup DeepSeek could be valued at as much as $50 billion in its maiden fundraising drive, three sources said, as the large language model builder seeks to reverse its years-long strategy of rejecting outside funding

Co-founder of AI startup ‘LemonLime’ apologizes after going viral for offering job interviews to whoever got a tattoo of the company’s logo “I’m sorry to the people we put in that position, and to everyone who expected better from me.“

DEEPSEEK PAUSES FUNDRAISING Chinese AI startup DeepSeek has reportedly paused its second fundraising round, informing prospective investors that no investment agreements will be signed for now, according to Bloomberg. The company may restart the process later. Reuters previously reported DeepSeek was also exploring a potential IPO on Shanghai’s STAR Market.