#ai-infrastructure

#ai-infrastructure

This page will be updated throughout the day to reflect any new fundings. AI INFRASTRUCTURE Modal Labs, a serverless platform for AI, data, and ML teams, has raised $87M in Series B funding led by Lux Capital. Founded by Akshat Bubna and Erik Bernhardsson in 2021, Modal Labs has now raised a total of $110M in reported equity funding. REACH NYC TECH LEADERS AlleyWatch is NYC's leading source of tech and startup news, reaching the city's most active founders, investors, and tech leaders.

If Fundstrat's Tom Lee isn't consistently Wall Street's biggest bull, he's certainly one of the most vocal. Either way, the man's track record has been nothing short of respectable. And while time will tell if he's right to stay bullish on the broad stock (and especially the small caps), I do think that he's a market strategist who's worth listening to closely whenever he has another call to make.

Google has helped strike another deal with a Bitcoin miner. On Thursday, Cipher Mining announced that it was leasing a data warehouse it owns in Colorado City, Texas, to an AI computing startup. The Bitcoin miner projects the contract to net the company $3 billion over its initial 10-year term and $7 billion if two five-year extensions are exercised. Cipher Mining struck the deal with Fluidstack, an AI computing startup based in the U.K.

On Thursday, the AI platform Clarifai announced a new reasoning engine that it claims will make running AI models twice as fast and 40% less expensive. Designed to be adaptable to a variety of models and cloud hosts, the system employs a range of optimizations to get more inference power out of the same hardware. "It's a variety of different types of optimizations, all the way down to CUDA kernels to advanced speculative decoding techniques," said CEO Matthew Zeiler. "You can get more out of the same cards, basically." The results were verified by a string of benchmark tests by the third-party firm Artificial Analysis, which recorded industry-best records for both throughput and latency.

I'll go on record as to say I'm the best thing that's ever happened to him,

Nvidia is set to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI and supply it with data center chips, in a deal that gives the chipmaker a financial stake in the world's most prominent AI company, which is already an important customer. Investments in systems powering AI have surged since OpenAI launched ChatGPT in 2022, on expectations that companies across sectors will integrate the technology into their products and services.

"unwavering commitment"

It takes a lot of computing power to run an AI product - and as the tech industry races to tap the power of AI models, there's a parallel race underway to build the infrastructure that will power them. On a recent earnings call, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang estimated that between $3 and $4 trillion will be spent on AI infrastructure by the end of the decade - with much of that money coming from AI companies themselves.

Altogether, Lumen said construction was underway coast-to-coast, and that it has delivered "significant" progress in its mission to build the backbone for the artificial intelligence (AI) economy. It added that it was moving forward with a multibillion-dollar build, with plans to add 34 million intercity fibre miles by the end of 2028, as part of the 47 million intercity fibre mile target.

Moody's said late last week that the OpenAI "contract size is staggering - highlighting the tremendous potential for Oracle's AI Infrastructure. However, the related risks of the build are significant." It pointed to the significant "counterparty risk" in Oracle's projected growth - the possibility that another party fails to meet its obligations. "Counterparty risk is always a key consideration in any type of project financing, particularly where there is a high reliance on revenue from a single counterparty," Moody's analysts wrote on Wednesday.

The OpenAI CEO said in a post on X on Monday that the company is launching "new compute-intensive offerings" over the next few weeks. Altman said because of the costs involved, some features will initially be limited to Pro subscribers, while certain new products will have extra fees. Altman framed the push as an experiment in stretching AI infrastructure to its limits: "We also want to learn what's possible when we throw a lot of compute, at today's model costs, at interesting new ideas," he wrote.

Jensen Huang, the boss of the chipmaker Nvidia, had some advice for UK ministers last week as they signed a multibillion-pound tech deal with the US: burn more gas. I've every confidence that the UK will realise that it takes energy to grow new industries, he said. Sustainable power like nuclear and wind and of course all of that solar is all going to contribute. But I'm also hoping that gas turbines can also contribute.

In his conference keynote, Groundbreaking SuperPoD Interconnect: Leading a new paradigm for AI infrastructure, Eric Xu, the deputy chairman of the board and rotating chairman of the IT and networking giant, stressed that Huawei's goal was to sustainably meet long-term computing demand by building SuperPoDs - defined as a single logical machine, made up of multiple physical machines that can learn, think and reason as one - and SuperClusters, with the semiconductor manufacturing process nodes that he said were "practically" available to the Chinese mainland.

When Oracle launched its cloud service, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), in 2016, very few in the tech industry believed the company could become a serious player in the public cloud market. Established giants like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud had not only dominated the market for years but also had set a high bar for innovation, scale, and performance that seemed insurmountable to newcomers.

Top tech names were on the guest list for the banquet thrown for President Trump during his second state visit to the UK on Wednesday. The banquet seating chart included NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang; Apple CEO Tim Cook; venture capitalist and White House AI and crypto czar David Sacks; Alphabet and Google president Ruth Porat; Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella; Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff; and OpenAI's Sam Altman, according to the New York Times.

With today's announcement, Google is deepening our roots in the UK and helping support Great Britain's potential with AI to add £400 billion to the economy by 2030 while also enhancing critical social services. Google's investment in technical infrastructure, expanded energy capacity, and job-ready AI skills will help ensure everyone in Broxbourne and across the whole of the UK stays at the cutting-edge of global tech opportunities.

Regardless of this year's stock market volatility, the explosive demand for semiconductors and microchips that has grabbed news headlines and led the market higher over the past few years remains. As the drive toward integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into our everyday lives progresses, a handful of mega-cap companies are capable of meeting that demand. While Nvidia Corp. ( NASDAQ: NVDA) may get the lion's share of attention, companies like Broadcom Inc. ( NASDAQ: AVGO) will also be playing a central role in supply.

[A]s we introduce all photonics networks and this end to end connectivity, extend it into the data center, we're reducing the latency such that it starts to feel much more like it's just another server and another rack in the same data center. We're literally approaching the speed of light in terms of how we transmit signals from end to end and the latency in, say, thousand of kilometers is still measured in a small number of milliseconds

AI workloads are already expensive due to the high cost of renting GPUs and the associated energy consumption. Memory bandwidth issues make things worse. When memory lags, workloads take longer to process. Longer runtimes result in higher costs, as cloud services charge based on hourly usage. Essentially, memory inefficiencies increase the time to compute, turning what should be cutting-edge performance into a financial headache.

The private fund landscape is entering a new phase of sophistication. As the market matures, the focus is shifting towards the forward-looking evolution of how capital is raised. This new era prioritizes long-term value, where success in 2025 and beyond will be defined by superior strategy, clear specialization, and disciplined execution. Markets could see a flight to quality, as discerning investors consolidate relationships with established managers who possess clear, defensible strategies.