
River AI Raised $1.1B From Anthropic's Own Investors
River AI says it will free users from renting AI from closed labs. General Catalyst, AMP PBC, Temasek and NVIDIA, the money behind that pitch, are also major Anthropic investors.
They summarize our coverage. We write it.
Newsletters like this one rebroadcast our headlines - often without the full review, the source reading, or the analysis underneath. Our weekly briefing sends the work they paraphrase, straight from the desk, before they get to it.
Free, weekly, no spam. One email every Tuesday. Unsubscribe anytime.

River AI says it will free users from renting AI from closed labs. General Catalyst, AMP PBC, Temasek and NVIDIA, the money behind that pitch, are also major Anthropic investors.

Nvidia is partnering with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR to mobilize over $500 billion for AI infrastructure, reviving circular financing fears.

Richard Socher's Recursive Superintelligence signed a $410 million multi-year AWS compute deal with no equity stake, a rare cash-only structure in an industry built on circular financing.

DeepSeek suspended a second funding round targeting a valuation above $70 billion after comments attributed to founder Liang Wenfeng went viral, days before a planned mainland China IPO.

Nvidia is negotiating to backstop $250 billion in financing for OpenAI's 10-gigawatt Ohio data center, plus another $350 billion for the chips going inside it, reviving the circular financing debate.

Cognition paid a low nine-figure sum for texting assistant Poke, its second acquisition in a year, betting that how an AI agent talks matters as much as what it can do.

Etched raised $300M at a $10.3B valuation, doubling its price tag in seven months, even though its transformer-only Sohu chip has yet to ship in volume.

Travis Kalanick's robotics holding company Atoms raised $1.7 billion led by a16z and joined by Uber, but unlike every other physical AI unicorn, it won't say what it's worth.

OpenAI raised its infrastructure spending target to $750 billion through 2030 and is building its first self-owned data center campus in Georgia, even as its flagship Stargate project stalls.

Nonprofit Current AI wants a free, public alternative to Big Tech's AI models, and it has $400 million and a chatbot to show for it so far.

Databricks signed a term sheet for a $188 billion valuation days after quietly making a Chinese open-weight model its default coding engine over Anthropic.

General Compute borrowed $400 million from Upper90 against a fleet of SambaNova SN50 inference chips, the first major AI infrastructure loan not collateralized by Nvidia hardware.