AI Daily: Musk’s xAI in talks to raise $15B at $230B 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:

NEW EQUITY: Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s xAI is in advanced talks to raise $15B in new equity at a $230B valuation, The Wall Street Journal’s Becky Peterson and Berber Jin report, citing people familiar with the plans. This new valuation would be a significant increase from the $113B valuation disclosed after xAI acquired X in March. The terms of the new fundraising were disclosed to investors by Musk’s wealth manager, Jared Birchall, on Tuesday night, the people say.

FUNDING RAISE: Artificial intelligence startup AGI, Inc is in talks to raise $50M at a $500M valuation, people familiar with the matter told Forbes. The company, which previously raised $10M from Menlo Ventures, is aiming to develop AI assistants that can use devices on behalf of humans, Forbes’ Anna Tong reports. Beyond this, sources told Forbes that AGI, Inc has told investors it’s begun partnership discussions with a number of big device manufacturers. Samsung (SSNLF), Lenovo (LNVGY) and Xiaomi (XIACY) are among the companies exploring its “agentic” AI technology which would power AI assistants capable of performing actions more complex than current assistants like Siri and Google (GOOG(GOOGL) Assistant.

AI INFRASTRUCTURE PROGRAM: Brookfield (BAM) announced the launch of a $100B global AI Infrastructure program in partnership with Nvidia (NVDA) and the Kuwait Investment Authority, KIA. Brookfield will anchor the program with the Brookfield Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure Fund, which launches with a target of $10B of equity commitments to invest in the backbone of artificial intelligence. BAIIF has already received $5 billion of capital commitments from a select group of institutional and industry partners, including Brookfield, Nvidia and KIA. BAIIF, together with additional capital from its co-investors and prudent financing, will acquire up to $100 billion of AI infrastructure assets, deploying investment across every stage of the value chain-from energy and land to data centers and compute.

AI-POWERED VIDEO RECAPS: Amazon (AMZN) Prime Video said it has released a new feature – Video Recaps, now in beta and available on select Prime Originals. Video Recaps use AI to identify a show’s most important plot points, combining them with synchronized voice narration, dialogue snippets, and music to create a visual summary that prepares viewers for the new season, the company said. “Video Recaps marks a groundbreaking application of generative AI for streaming,” said Gerard Medioni, vice president of technology at Prime Video. “This first-of-its-kind feature demonstrates Prime Video’s ongoing commitment to innovation and making the viewing experience more accessible and enjoyable for customers.” Video Recaps follows Prime Video’s 2024 release of X-Ray Recaps, an AI-powered feature that creates spoiler-free and easy-to-digest text summaries of key cliffhangers, character-driven plot points, and other important details. The feature is available now in beta for select English-language Prime Original series in the U.S.

PARTNERSHIP: OpenText (OTEX) announced an expanded partnership with Google (GOOG, GOOGL) Cloud to deliver solutions across artificial intelligence, or AI, data privacy, and sovereign cloud infrastructure. The collaboration combines OpenText’s enterprise information management expertise with Google Cloud’s AI and infrastructure technologies to help organizations solve complex business challenges with confidence and agility. OpenText will leverage Google’s Gemini models and Vertex AI to drive new AI use cases and deliver a suite of intelligent agents in Gemini Enterprise. OpenText is also introducing a new data protection solution for the retail sector, which integrates OpenText’s Data Privacy and Protection platform with Google BigQuery. This joint offering delivers advanced encryption and data protection for sensitive data at rest, in transit, and as it feeds AI models-ensuring compliance with evolving privacy regulations.

AI SECURITY: Check Point (CHKP) announced it is collaborating with Microsoft (MSFT) to deliver AI security for Microsoft Copilot Studio. The collaboration enables enterprises to build and deploy generative-AI agents with continuous protection, compliance, and governance integrated directly into their development workflows. The integration with Copilot Studio brings together Check Point’s AI Guardrails, Data Loss Prevention and Threat Prevention technologies, extending its end-to-end AI security stack to safeguard Copilot Studio during agent runtime. “The rapid adoption of AI agents brings not only innovation and efficiency, but also new security challenges, particularly around maintaining data integrity and preventing misuse of sensitive information,” said Nataly Kremer, chief product officer at Check Point. “Together with Microsoft, we’re providing advanced continuous protection and governance directly into Microsoft Copilot Studio, ensuring that every AI interaction, including autonomous actions within the enterprise, remains secure, compliant, and aligned with enterprise policies.”