AI Daily: Claude chatbot maker Anthropic raising $10B at $350B 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.

ANTHROPIC VALUATION: Anthropic, the developer of the chatbot Claude, plans to raise $10B at a valuation of $350B before the new investment, people familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal‘s Kate Clark. GIC, Singapore’s sovereign-wealth fund, and Coatue Management plan to lead the new financing, which follows a $13B investment in September that valued the company at $183B, says the report, which adds that the funding round is expected to close in the coming weeks.

NVIDIA CHIPS: The Chinese government this week asked some tech companies to temporarily halt plans to buy Nvidia’s (NVDA) H200 AI chips, according to two people involved in the communication, throwing up a possible roadblock in Nvidia’s hopes of restarting chip sales to one of its biggest markets, The Information’s Qianer Liu reports. The instruction came roughly a month after President Donald Trump said he would allow Nvidia to sell H200s to China, marking the biggest rollback of Biden-era export restrictions, the author notes.

TAKEOVER OF MANUS: Chinese officials are reviewing Meta‘s (META) $2B takeover of Singapore-based AI company Manus for potential technology export control violations, the Financial Times’ Ryan McMorrow and Zijing Wu report. Officials in China’s commerce ministry are looking into whether the relocation of Manus’ staff and technology to Singapore from China and the subsequent sale to the Facebook parent required an export license under Chinese law, the authors say, citing two people familiar with the matter.

PROBE: Elon Musk’s X is facing fresh probes in Europe, India, and Malaysia after its Grok chatbot began generating deepfake explicit images, some depicting child sex abuse, CNBC’s Lora Kolodny reports. The U.K.’s Ofcom has requested information from X regarding the Grok issues, while in the U.S., the National Center for Sexual Exploitation is calling on the DOJ and the FTC to investigate the matter.

CHIP COOLING CONCERNS: Shares of Modine Manufacturing (MOD) are trading lower for a second straight session, adding to Tuesday’s losses following Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s comments at the Consumer Electronics Show. The chip giant’s CEO said that Rubin chips could be cooled without water chillers, sending shares of other U.S. heating, ventilation and air conditioning-related companies – including Aaon (AAON), Johnson Controls (JCI) and Trane Technologies (TT) – into negative territory as well. DA Davidson believes Nvidia could be attempting to replace the data center cooling architecture with dry cooling or potentially evaporative cooling instead of mechanical chillers, noting Modine also makes dry coolers today.

GIGAWATT AI FACTORIES PROGRAM: Lenovo (LNVGY) unveiled the Lenovo AI Cloud Gigafactory with Nvidia (NVDA), expanding its partnership with Nvidia through a “shared commitment to accelerating hybrid AI adoption across personal, enterprise and public AI platforms.” “In the AI era, value is no longer measured by compute alone, but also by how fast it delivers results,” said Yuanqing Yang, Chairman and CEO of Lenovo. “Together, Lenovo and NVIDIA are pushing the boundaries of AI factories to the gigawatt level, simplifying deployment of cloud-scale infrastructure that moves AI intelligence into production faster, with greater efficiency and predictability. With Lenovo’s industry leading Neptune liquid cooling technology, global manufacturing and service capabilities, the Lenovo AI Cloud Gigafactory with Nvidia sets a new benchmark for scalable AI factory design, enabling the world’s most advanced AI environments to be deployed in record-setting time, fueling innovation at manufacturing speed across industries.”

ENTERPRISE ADOPTION: Infosys (INFY) announced its strategic collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AMZN) to accelerate enterprise adoption of generative artificial intelligence. The initiative focuses on combining Infosys Topaz and Amazon Q Developer to enhance Infosys’ internal operations.