How Did AI Chips Attract $1.1B By Tuesday? 🤖📈💸

TL;DR

• AI chips pulled in $1.1B fresh VC capital
• Big Tech plans $650B AI infra spend this year
• Sector deals span robots, accounting, cybersecurity, data infra
• Governments ramp AI roadmaps, sovereign chip partnerships globally

HEADLINES

Big Tech Titans will pour $650B into AI 💸🔗

AI Chip Startups soaked up $1.1B this week 🧠🔗

Wall Street rebounded as AI deals lifted software 📈🔗

Nikkei 225 hit record as AI jitters eased 🗼🔗

Meta Platforms eyed $100B AMD AI chip deal ⚙️🔗

FROM THE BIG PLAYERS

Jane Street & Situational Awareness invested $500M in MatX 💾🔗

Innovation Industries invested $250M in Axelera AI 💡🔗

Accel and GV invested $100M in Basis 📚🔗

Vista Equity & Intel Capital invested $350M in SambaNova 🖥️🔗

Baidu invested $144M in AI² Robotics 🤖🔗

RAISES

Basis raised $100M in a Series B led by/from Accel 📊🔗

Astelia raised $35M in combined Seed and Series A led by/from Index Ventures 🛡️🔗

AI² Robotics raised $144M in a Series B led by/from Baidu and CRRC 🦿🔗

S2.dev raised $3.85M in a Seed round led by/from Accel 🌐🔗

Astelia added follow-on capital to scale AI-native exposure platform from Team8 🔐🔗

NEW LAUNCHES

Cisco Systems launched Secure AI Factory Australia 🏭🔗

Samsung unveiled Galaxy S26 with expanded Galaxy AI 📱🔗

Anthropic announced Claude agents inside Salesforce and Intuit 🤝🔗

TestMu AI enabled Android 17 real-device beta testing 🧪🔗

TRY THESE TOOLS

TestMu AI full‑stack agentic QA for real devices 🧑‍💻🔗

Aira AI sales agent for meetings and research 📞🔗

Perplexity AI multimodal assistant now embedded in Galaxy S26 🔍🔗

DTEX Insider Risk AI monitors data exfiltration and insider threats 🚨🔗

METRICS

AI chips attracted $1.1B VC funding this week 📊🔗

Big Tech capex set to hit $650B for AI 🏗️🔗

Insider risk costs reached $19.5M per organization annually 📉🔗

Indonesia AI adoption reported at 92% across organizations 🌏🔗

Nikkei 225 hit a fresh all‑time high today 📈🔗

BENCHMARKS

ContentGrip analysis tracked 17 US AI startups raising $100M+ 📘🔗

BNP Paribas put G7 AI readiness index at 0.72 📏🔗

DTEX–Ponemon report showed insider‑risk AI tools cut containment to 67 days 📑🔗

Trusted Brands survey highlighted trust as core AI brand asset 🏅🔗

INFRA & COSTS

Meta–AMD deal targets $100B MI450 data‑center chips 🧱🔗

MatX raised $500M for LLM‑optimized accelerators 💽🔗

SambaNova SN50 promises 3x lower TCO for inference ⚙️🔗

Axelera Europa matches A100 INT8 at <45W power 🔌🔗

Cisco AI Factory built sovereign AI infra with NVIDIA in Australia 🏗️🔗

VALUATIONS

Wayve valued at $8.6B after $1.2B round 🚗🔗

Basis hit $1.15B valuation with Series B 📐🔗

AI² Robotics crossed $1.4B unicorn valuation 🦾🔗

Axelera AI surpassed $450M total funding to date 🏷️🔗

POLICY

South Korea AI Council adopted three‑year national AI roadmap ⚖️🔗

Southeast Asia assessed AI governance shaped by GDPR and AI Act 🌏🔗

Australia critics warned government is “not regulating AI harms” ⚠️🔗

US Pentagon pressured Anthropic over military AI access 🛡️🔗

Indonesia minister urged policy shift from AI adoption to productivity 📜🔗

SOVEREIGN

Danantara sovereign fund partnered with ARM on national chip design 🏛️🔗

BNP Paribas projected EM growth from AI infra trade 📊🔗

US Tech Corps launched to export American AI expertise 🦅🔗

Indonesia government opened Garuda Spark hub linking AI startups, VCs 🕊️🔗

SECTORS

Autonomous mobility deployed Wayve driver AI for robotaxis 🚕🔗

Manufacturing deployed AlphaBot 2 humanoids on factory floors 🏭🔗

Accounting deployed Basis agents for end‑to‑end workflows 📒🔗

Enterprise software deployed Claude models inside Salesforce and Intuit 💼🔗

Telecom and data centers deployed SambaNova SN50 in SoftBank facilities 📡🔗

COMMUNITY MEMBER SPOTLIGHT

Women in AI Club hosted Lunar New Year AI investor gala 🐉🔗