AI & Money

Nvidia agreed to invest up to $2.1 billion in IREN through a five-year option to buy 30 million shares at $70 each, alongside a separate $3.4 billion AI-cloud agreement under which IREN will deploy Blackwell GPUs. The companies said IREN's Sweetwater, Texas campus could grow from 2 GW of planned capacity to as much as 5 GW of Nvidia-powered infrastructure. IREN — originally a Bitcoin miner now pivoting to AI compute — has rallied 51% YTD on top of 285% in 2025 and already holds a $9.7 billion AI-capacity deal with Microsoft. Critics frame Nvidia's pattern of investing in firms that then buy its chips as “circular”; CEO Jensen Huang has rejected that label. The deal joins recent Nvidia stakes in OpenAI, Marvell, Corning, CoreWeave and Nebius across the AI compute stack.Bloomberg ↗

In Import AI 455, Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark argues a parallel "machine economy" is starting to form inside the existing economy, populated by firms that are capital-heavy (owning compute), opex-heavy (renting AI services) and increasingly labour-light. He expects these companies to trade more and more with one another over time, and eventually for fully autonomous AI-run corporations to emerge — a structural shift he says will surface "profoundly weird" questions on inequality, redistribution and governance. Clark anchors the thesis in capital flows already on the board: Recursive Superintelligence (Rocktäschel, Socher, Clune) raised $500M at a $4B valuation from GV and Nvidia in April 2026 to automate the AI research pipeline; Ineffable Intelligence raised $1.1B at $5.1B; OpenAI has publicly committed to an "automated AI research intern by September 2026"; Anthropic and DeepMind are publishing on automated alignment research. The aggregate is hundreds of billions of capital sunk specifically into firms whose product is automating the production of AI itself.Import AI ↗

Former DeepMind reinforcement-learning lead David Silver, best known for AlphaZero, has raised $1.1 billion at a $5.1 billion valuation for his London-based lab Ineffable Intelligence, only months after founding the company. Sequoia and Lightspeed led the round, with Index, Google, Nvidia, the British Business Bank and the UK's Sovereign AI fund participating. Silver has pledged to donate his personal proceeds to high-impact charities, and the lab is positioned to build a 'superlearner' that acquires capability through reinforcement learning rather than human-generated data. The round is the latest in a pattern of London 'coconut rounds' — billion-dollar early-stage raises by star DeepMind alumni — alongside Yann LeCun's AMI Labs ($1.03 billion) and Tim Rocktäschel's Recursive Superintelligence (around $500 million to $1 billion). Together with Bezos's Project Prometheus, the cluster signals London consolidating as a serious AI hub anchored on DeepMind talent.TechCrunch ↗

AI agents are found to have directly influenced $262 billion in US holiday retail sales, forcing banks and payment networks to confront a structural shift: their systems were designed for human-initiated transactions, not autonomous agentic commerce where AI makes spending decisions and triggers payments on behalf of consumers. Payment processors begin emergency architecture reviews; regulators open inquiries into liability frameworks for AI-initiated transactions as the line between a recommendation and a transaction blurs.Source: Fintech Weekly

Anthropic closed a $30 billion Series G at a $380 billion post-money valuation. It is the second-largest private venture deal in recorded history, behind only OpenAI's $122 billion round closed weeks later. The round formalises a two-horse frontier-lab race in funding terms: OpenAI and Anthropic together account for over $150 billion in private capital raised in a single quarter. The valuation prices Anthropic above all but a handful of public technology companies. It also gives the lab the runway to keep buying frontier-scale compute, datacentre commitments and talent against OpenAI without ceding ground.Crunchbase report

Media analyses and earnings reporting indicate that the largest technology companies are collectively planning capital expenditure of more than $600 to $650 billion in 2026 on AI-related infrastructure, covering data centres, accelerators, and compute capacity. Strong forecasts from ASML and TSMC reinforced the signal that the AI spending boom was intact through the first quarter of 2026, even as questions mounted about utilisation, depreciation schedules, and grid availability. The scale pushes hyperscaler capex well above the combined capital budgets of the US oil majors and utilities sectors for the year, locking in multi-year commitments that shape semiconductor, power, and real-estate markets well beyond 2026.Source: Bloomberg / Reuters