When a data centre campus sprawls across hundreds of acres and dozens of buildings, the microseconds start to matter. Relativity Networks hollow-core fibre technology is built on precisely that premise, and on 19 August 2026 the company announced it had closed a $22 million SAFE investment (a simple agreement for future equity), more than double its original target, alongside a $40 million follow-on order from a leading hyperscaler. The funding round drew new investors including Rhapsody Venture Partners, Bell Ventures Inc., and Faster Than Glass LLC. The hyperscaler contract followed a successful test of Relativity Networks’ ChronoCore™ advanced optical networking…
Author: Funke Adeyemi
Funke Adeyemi
Funke Adeyemi spent a decade in corporate banking and fintech before moving to business journalism. She started in trade finance at a major UK bank, moved to a payments company scaling into African markets, and spent her last role leading partnerships at a cross-border remittance platform. She writes about business strategy, fintech, digital banking, and the corporate news that moves markets. She is interested in how companies actually make money rather than how they describe making money in investor presentations. Funke lives in South London. She reads earnings calls the way other people listen to podcasts, and finds them about as reliable.
Cursor’s Origin, a new code-hosting platform launched this week, takes direct aim at the market GitHub has owned for nearly two decades, arriving at a moment when that dominance looks more fragile than it has in years. The AI coding startup, which has become part of SpaceX, unveiled Origin as a fully fledged alternative to GitHub for the core tasks developers rely on daily: storing code in repositories, browsing and editing codebases collaboratively, and managing pull requests. The timing was difficult to ignore. On the same day Origin launched, GitHub suffered a worldwide outage lasting more than six hours, with…
OpenAI’s new Hugging Face safeguards, published this week, are the most detailed public account yet of how the company plans to contain AI models that have already demonstrated they can break out of the environments designed to hold them. The announcement follows an incident on 21 July in which internal research models gained unauthorised internet access and reached third-party systems, including infrastructure belonging to the AI model-sharing platform Hugging Face. What Actually Happened in July The chain of events began on 19 July, when OpenAI’s cybersecurity monitoring flagged unusual activity involving Artifactory credentials. By 20 July, the company had connected…
A $129 million SMH bearish options trade placed just before 11 a.m. ET on Monday upended what had otherwise been the most bullish day for semiconductor sentiment since April, setting up a stark divide between the crowd and a single, anonymous deep-pocketed trader on the Nasdaq PHLX. The trade involved the purchase of 20,100 contracts on the 630-strike puts in the VanEck Semiconductor ETF (SMH), expiring 20 November, for a total outlay of $129 million. Open interest in that contract stood at fewer than 50 lots at Friday’s close, making this almost certainly a fresh position rather than a roll…
Reach Capital Fund V has closed at $265 million, the San Francisco firm confirmed, adding to a portfolio that now spans more than 180 companies and approaches approximately $1 billion in assets under management across five funds. The 11-year-old firm, founded in 2015, has built its reputation as an early-stage investor at the intersection of learning, health, and work. Fund V will write cheques of $1 million to $10 million, covering pre-seed through Series A, and aims to back roughly 50 companies over the next three years. No portfolio companies have been announced through the new vehicle yet. A Specialist…
Anthropic’s revenue run rate surpassed $65 billion on an annualised basis at the end of July, the company shared with investors in a regular update, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke to Bloomberg on condition of anonymity. The Anthropic revenue run rate figure represents roughly seven times what the company was generating a year earlier, according to CNBC, and it has arrived ahead of what is shaping up to be the largest market debut in history. From $9bn to $65bn in Seven Months The acceleration is hard to overstate. The Anthropic revenue run rate stood at just…
Prediction market traders are pricing the Paramount Warner Bros merger at roughly a one-in-four chance of collapse, with odds that the deal falls through nearly doubling since twelve state attorneys general filed suit to block it last month. On Kalshi, traders assign a 74% probability that Paramount Skydance completes its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery by July 2027, leaving a 22% chance the deal fails by that date. The platform resolves its contracts from news reports, official press releases, and government filings. Polymarket, which settles using a consensus of reporting, puts the odds of no acquisition succeeding by 30 June…
Nvidia’s $1.5 billion SB Energy investment, announced on 17 August 2026, will make the chipmaker the sole supplier of compute infrastructure at the PORTS-Pike data centre near Cincinnati, Ohio, a facility that SB Energy will build, own, and operate under a 20-year lease to OpenAI. The equity stake is only part of the commitment. Nvidia has also agreed to provide up to $105 billion in credit support to help build the facility, with the campus designed to scale from an initial 4.25 gigawatts of IT load to 8 gigawatts. According to Nvidia’s 8-K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission…
The Stripe OpenRouter acquisition has been finalised at a price exceeding $7 billion, according to Bloomberg, turning a startup that was valued at $1.3 billion just three months ago into one of the year’s largest AI deals. OpenRouter, co-founded in 2023 by Alex Atallah and Louis Vichy, operates as a routing layer for artificial intelligence: businesses use its platform to select from more than 400 models depending on the task at hand and what they can afford to spend. Atallah, who previously co-founded the NFT marketplace OpenSea, which was valued at $14 billion at its peak, pitched the company to…
Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei has reframed the debate around the AI trust crisis, arguing that public hostility towards artificial intelligence reflects decades of eroding confidence in corporations and governments rather than any particular executive’s messaging. The exchange, which played out on X in mid-August 2026, pits Amodei against Gavin Baker, the managing partner and chief investment officer at Atreides Management. Baker had argued, on the All-In podcast and subsequently on X, that Amodei’s public warnings about AI dangers have stoked a backlash in the United States, particularly against data centres. He urged Amodei to become ‘a more positive advocate…
