SoftBank's SB Energy Files IPO With Cloud Ambitions, No Data Centers

Wafer, a one-year-old San Francisco startup, raised $40 million in Series A funding led by Marathon Management Partners and Chemistry, achieving a valuation above $200 million. The company uses AI agents to optimize open-source models for specific business workloads across non-Nvidia chips. Wafer has reportedly received acquisition offers and is positioning itself as an alternative inference provider for enterprises seeking to run AI models on diverse hardware.

Empirik, a Sequoia-backed startup, launched with $21M in funding to predict IT infrastructure outages before they occur. The company positions itself as applying AI to infrastructure reliability in a way comparable to how Cursor transformed software engineering. The startup aims to help organizations avoid downtime by identifying potential failures in advance.

AfterQuery, an AI model-training startup, has raised funding that values it at $3.2 billion, just five months after its April Series A at $300 million. The company has reportedly become Y Combinator's fastest-ever unicorn based on the speed of its valuation growth. The rapid ascent reflects intense investor appetite for AI infrastructure and model-training capabilities.

Anthropic has signed a $35 billion compute capacity deal with Lambda Labs, an Nvidia-backed cloud provider. Nvidia will supply the chips for the data center providing the capacity and hold a stake in the arrangement. The deal underscores the critical role of GPU supply and cloud infrastructure partnerships in scaling large language model development.