AI Daily: Anthropic weighs raising funds at nearly $1T valuation

Catch up on the top artificial intelligence news and commentary by Wall Street analysts on publicly traded companies in the space with this daily recap compiled by The Fly.

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DEAL FOR NEARLY $1T VALUATION: Anthropic is weighing raising tens of billions of dollars this summer to fund a major expansion in computing capacity, a move that could lift its valuation to nearly $1T and put it ahead of rival OpenAI, The Financial Times’ George Hammond and Zijing Wu report.

PARTNERSHIP: Nvidia (NVDA) and Iren (IREN) announced a strategic partnership “to accelerate deployment of next-generation AI infrastructure.” As part of the partnership, the companies intend to support deployment of up to 5 gigawatts of Nvidia DSX-aligned AI infrastructure across Iren’s data center pipeline over time. Nvidia and Iren will collaborate on “deployment of Nvidia accelerated compute in DSX AI factories to expand access to AI-native, startup and enterprise customers.” As part of the partnership, Iren issued to Nvidia a five-year right to purchase up to 30M shares of ordinary stock at an exercise price of $70 per share, resulting in a right to invest up to $2.1B. “The partnership is intended to accelerate deployment of large-scale AI factories by combining Nvidia’s DSX AI factory architecture with Iren’s expertise across power, land, data centers, GPU deployment and infrastructure operations. Future deployments are expected to focus on Iren’s 2-gigawatt Sweetwater campus in Texas, which the companies expect to serve as a flagship deployment for Nvidia’s DSX architecture,” the companies said.

NVIDIA CHIPS: A firm linked to Thailand’s national AI initiative is suspected of helping smuggle billions of dollars’ worth of Super Micro Computer (SMCI) servers containing advanced Nvidia (NVDA) chips to China, Bloomberg’s Mackenzie Hawkins and Kari Soo Lindberg report. Some of the $2.5B worth of servers sold to OBON allegedly went to Alibaba (BABA), according to people familiar with the matter. “Alibaba has no business relationship with Super Micro, OBON or any third-party brokers who may have been mentioned in the indictment in question,” a spokesperson for the Chinese company said. “We have no involvement in the alleged smuggling activities. We do not currently use, and have never used, any banned Nvidia chips at our data centers.”

CLOUD COMPUTING PACT: Anthropic has inked a $1.8B computing agreement with Akamai Technologies (AKAM) in an effort to meet increasing demand for its AI software, Bloomberg’s Rachel Metz reports, citing people familiar with the matter. Akamai had said this week that it reached a seven-year cloud computing deal with a “leading frontier model provider,” but did not name the company in the deal, the author notes.

NEW AI MODELS: Vice President JD Vance expressed alarm on a recent call with technology CEOs over new AI models such as Anthropic’s Mythos, The Wall Street Journal’s Amrith Ramkumar, Brian Schwartz, and Natalie Andrews report. The White House is weighing an executive order that could create a formal oversight process for the most advanced AI models, and Washington and Beijing are weighing the launch of official discussions about the risks posed by AI ahead of next week’s summit in China, the report notes. “We all need to work together on this,” Vance told CEOs, including OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Dario Amodei of Anthropic, Elon Musk of SpaceX, Alphabet’s (GOOGL) Sundar Pichai, and Satya Nadella of Microsoft (MSFT), according to people familiar with the matter.

AI PUSH: Meta (META) is pushing its 78,000 workers to use AI tools and including their use of the technology in performance reviews, which comes as the company is eliminating positions to offset AI spending, the New York Times’ Kalley Huang, Eli Tan and Kate Conger report, citing current and former employees. Meta is also tracking the staff’s computer usage to feed and train its AI models, causing anger and anxiety as employees await news of whether they are impacted by job cuts, which are expected to be executed on May 20. Some staff said they no longer viewed Meta as a place for a long career, while others are looking for new jobs or trying to signal they want to be laid off for severance.