AI providers

Modal Labs, a company providing AI inference infrastructure, is reportedly close to raising $750 million in new funding at a $15.75 billion valuation, according to TechCrunch. The round would underscore continued investor enthusiasm for firms supplying the computing backbone that lets other developers run AI models at scale.

Univer is an open-source TypeScript project from dream-num that bills itself as an 'Office Harness for AI Agents'. It provides a single runtime combining spreadsheets, documents, slides, canvas, relational tables, and PDF handling. The repository is trending on GitHub, and the framing suggests developers are interested in giving AI agents tools to create and manipulate office-style documents. Beyond the project's own description, there is little discussion in the available evidence explaining what users are saying about it.

A U.S. appeals court has upheld the government's designation of AI company Anthropic as a supply chain risk, a decision with major implications for the Pentagon's ability to work with the firm. The ruling reinforces federal authority to restrict AI providers deemed security concerns from defense-related procurement, and is being closely watched across the tech and defense industries for what it signals about oversight of leading artificial intelligence companies.

Long Lake, which describes itself as the world's first AI holding company, has completed its $6.3 billion acquisition of American Express Global Business Travel. The deal places a major corporate travel management provider under an AI-focused holding company, and the announcement is drawing attention as a notable example of AI-centered firms acquiring established travel businesses.

A new filing shows ByteDance gained access to more than 2,000 Nvidia B200 chips through Nscale's data center in Norway, reportedly circumventing US export restrictions on advanced chips bound for China. The same filing reveals that a Singaporean subsidiary, Spring, contributed 73% of the UK neocloud provider's 2025 revenue, drawing scrutiny to how Chinese firms obtain restricted AI hardware via third countries.

Nvidia has introduced an Open Agent Safety Platform, a reference framework for continuously monitoring AI agents in silicon. The platform, detailed on Nvidia's developer blog, is aimed at helping developers build safer agentic AI systems by providing tooling for ongoing oversight. Early reactions, particularly among developers, are focused on what in-silicon monitoring means for the reliability and safety of autonomous AI agents.

Chipmaker Cerebras has agreed to supply 100 megawatts worth of AI processors to Gimlet Labs, a cloud computing startup. The deal marks a significant supply commitment for the emerging AI infrastructure company and highlights growing demand for alternative AI compute providers beyond Nvidia. The reported scale of the agreement underscores how power-hungry AI data center buildouts have become.

New campaign finance disclosures in the United States reveal, for the first time in detail, how much American political campaigns are spending on artificial intelligence tools. The filings shed light on how campaigns are adopting AI for tasks like fundraising, messaging and voter outreach, and are prompting discussion about transparency, cost and the ethics of AI use in elections.

A new model focused on cyber open-source intelligence (OSINT) has been released, according to a brief announcement circulating among security practitioners. Details about who built the model, its capabilities, and how it compares to existing tools are not provided in the announcement. The security community is sharing the release as interest grows in AI tools applied to intelligence gathering and cybersecurity work.

A new market analysis projects the outlook for data-center AI chips through 2030, covering market size, compound annual growth rate, key trends, and forecasts. The report comes amid surging investment in AI infrastructure, as cloud providers and chipmakers race to supply the accelerators powering large-scale AI model training and deployment worldwide.

Inference provider Modal Labs is reportedly close to raising a $750 million funding round at a $15.75 billion valuation, according to a TechCrunch report. The deal would mark a major milestone for the AI infrastructure startup, which helps companies run machine learning inference workloads in the cloud. The report did not name investors, and the company has not officially confirmed the round.