Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced a series of collaborations with SoftBank Corp. to build Japan's most powerful AI supercomputer on Nvidia Blackwell chips, backing the government-funded Noetra consortium of SoftBank, Sony, Honda, and NEC. The deal, unveiled alongside Japan's trade ministry, supports Tokyo's push toward a domestic foundation model and a target of 10 million AI-equipped robots by 2040.
Why it matters
It's one of the largest sovereign AI buildouts to date and a template for how Nvidia is locking in chip demand by embedding itself directly in national AI strategies.
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INDUSTRY
Anthropic lines up investor meetings ahead of a possible October IPO
Anthropic is preparing investor meetings with Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and JPMorgan Chase as it moves toward a public listing as soon as October, potentially beating rival OpenAI to market. The timeline underscores how quickly both frontier labs have shifted from private mega-rounds toward public capital.
AI coding startup Emergent becomes a unicorn with $130 million round
The Indian startup raised a $130 million Series C led by Creaegis at a $1.5 billion valuation, a fivefold jump in six months, after crossing $120 million in annualized revenue. Emergent lets non-technical users build internal business software through an AI agent, with over 200,000 paying customers.
Neko Health raises $700 million for AI-driven full-body scans
Daniel Ek's preventive-health startup closed a Series C led by Lightspeed and O.G. Venture Partners, valuing the company near $7 billion as it prepares a US expansion. Neko uses AI to analyze full-body scans for early signs of disease across dozens of clinics.
SpaceXAI open-sources the coding agent behind Grok Build
The company released the Rust-based agent harness, terminal interface, and tool layer powering Grok Build under an Apache 2.0 license, letting developers inspect and modify the coding agent's internals. It follows Grok Build's beta launch in May as SpaceXAI's answer to Claude Code and Codex.
Alibaba leads $439 million round for Chinese AI video startup PixVerse
PixVerse (also known as AIsphere) closed a Series C extension led by Alibaba, pushing its valuation past $2 billion as it builds toward interactive world models. The deal reflects intensifying competition among Chinese tech giants to back AI video generation.
