Amir Efrati

Cognition, maker of the Devin coding assistant, is generating approximately $900 million in annualized revenue, up more than threefold since the start of 2026, according to previously unreported data. The company is currently raising funds at a valuation around $45 billion and counts BNY, Santander, and Mercedes among its customers. The growth signals that AI application startups can sustain momentum despite competition from larger players like Anthropic and OpenAI.

SoftBank is negotiating to acquire a majority stake in 1X Technologies, an OpenAI-backed humanoid robot developer, at a $6 billion valuation. The deal would provide 1X with additional funding after the 12-year-old startup fell short of its $1 billion fundraising target last fall, raising less than half that amount. The investment aligns with SoftBank's robotics strategy and would give 1X runway to deploy soft-bodied robots in customer homes for household tasks.

Nvidia has agreed to acquire Hugging Face, an open-source AI model repository, for $12.9 billion. The deal positions Nvidia to influence the competitive landscape between open and closed-source AI development. Nvidia's leadership views the acquisition as a strategic move to maintain its hardware dominance by supporting open-source alternatives that can counterbalance closed-source competitors like Anthropic and OpenAI, which are developing their own AI chips to reduce reliance on Nvidia.

Nvidia is raising prices for its Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin flagship AI chip systems by approximately 17%, according to server makers. The increase adds to mounting cost pressures facing cloud providers and data center developers, who are already contending with power infrastructure delays and other unexpected expenses. The price hike reflects Nvidia's market position as demand for advanced AI chips remains strong despite the growing cost burden on customers.

Nvidia has agreed to pay $6 billion to license AI model-development software from startup Poolside, according to a letter Poolside sent to investors. Poolside was an early developer of a coding AI agent before pivoting to data center development and releasing its own open-source models. The deal represents a significant licensing commitment from Nvidia to an emerging AI infrastructure player.

Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro signed an executive order on Tuesday requiring data center developers to make legally binding commitments on energy, environmental standards, and economic development before projects can proceed. The order establishes new permitting requirements that developers must satisfy to operate in the state. This represents a shift toward stricter oversight of data center expansion in Pennsylvania.

Jasjeet Sekhon, chief strategy officer at Google DeepMind, framed the AI industry's massive capital expenditures as a bet on recursive self-improvement (RSI), the ability of AI systems to automatically create better versions of themselves. Speaking at UC Berkeley's Agentic AI Summit, Sekhon called RSI a key part of the investment thesis. The framing signals a shift in how the industry publicly justifies unprecedented spending, with RSI emerging as the new goalpost after AGI dominated earlier discourse.

Google is expanding its tensor processing unit business beyond internal use and Google Cloud, now actively marketing TPUs to emerging cloud providers that have previously focused exclusively on renting Nvidia GPUs. The company has approached neocloud operators like Nscale as part of a competitive push against Nvidia's dominant market position in AI chips. This marks a strategic shift from Google's historical practice of keeping TPUs confined to its own infrastructure.

XAI, Meta, and Anthropic are expanding into adjacent business lines traditionally dominated by competitors, a pattern reflecting how major tech firms systematically encroach on each other's markets. XAI is renting spare server capacity, Meta launched an enterprise AI agent product, and Anthropic is developing custom AI server chips. This territorial overlap, documented across nine major tech firms since late 2024, mirrors historical patterns of tech industry consolidation and diversification.

Noam Shazeer, a key researcher behind Google's generative AI advances, is joining OpenAI. Shazeer had left Google in 2021 to co-found Character.AI, then rejoined Google DeepMind in 2024 as part of a $2.7 billion acquisition deal, where he became a tech lead on Gemini. His move to OpenAI represents a significant talent shift in the competitive AI research landscape.

Anthropic's revenue growth has dramatically outpaced OpenAI's in the first five months of 2026, with Anthropic generating an annualized run rate near $45 billion compared to OpenAI's estimated $33 billion. Anthropic's revenue grew five times over the period while OpenAI achieved roughly 50% growth, marking a significant shift in the competitive dynamics between the two leading AI companies. The gap suggests structural differences in how each company is monetizing its AI capabilities.

Pope Leo XIV published a 42,000-word treatise on AI policy concerns, joining Anthropic co-founders in warning about power concentration and labor displacement from artificial intelligence development. The Vatican document, titled Magnifica Humanitas, represents a significant institutional voice in ongoing debates about AI's societal impact and governance. The statement signals growing concern among religious and technology leaders about how AI development is concentrated among a small number of companies.

The White House is negotiating a deal that would grant the National Security Agency and other U.S. intelligence agencies access to Anthropic's advanced AI models for classified operations. The arrangement is proceeding despite the Defense Department previously designating Anthropic with a specific classification status. The deal represents a significant expansion of AI adoption within the U.S. intelligence community.

AMD reported accelerating AI chip revenue growth, projecting 46% growth in the current quarter compared to 38% growth in Q1, when the company posted $10.3 billion in revenue. The announcement drove AMD shares up 16% in after-hours trading. The acceleration reflects surging demand for AMD's AI graphics processing units as data centers scale generative AI infrastructure.

OpenAI missed an internal revenue target during Q1 2026, according to sources familiar with the company's performance. The shortfall follows earlier user-growth misses for ChatGPT and comes amid increased competition from Google's Gemini chatbot and other rivals gaining traction in the market. The missed goals suggest pressure on OpenAI's core consumer product even as the company pursues enterprise and API revenue streams.