Nvidia is in equity talks at a $30 billion-plus valuation, over 50% above the last round, per The Decoder citing The Information. Perplexity's annualized revenue tripled to $750 million-plus. This is the GPU-landlord playbook: an equity stake ahead of a large compute purchase. Our take.

XPeng's robotics arm closed a $900 million Series A at a $6.3 billion valuation, per PRNewswire. Alibaba and Tencent are both investors. IRON runs 3 in-house Turing chips at 2,250 TOPS on-device, with mass production targeted by end of 2026. Two rival giants backing the same physical-AI bet in one week is the real signal. Read it.

Alibaba priced a record $10.2 billion Hong Kong follow-on, 3x oversubscribed, per Bloomberg, with 100% of proceeds going to its AI full-stack push. Days later it shipped Wan3.0, a video model doing 30-second 1080p clips that accepts PDFs and slides as creative inputs. The raise and the release are one strategy, not two headlines. Our take.

In a Google Cloud survey of 1,402 IT leaders, 79% named security, governance, and MLOps the number-one blocker, ahead of compute cost. 83% say their current infrastructure needs an upgrade for agentic AI. The root problem Google names is "agent sprawl," and the fix is scoped permissions plus human approval gates. Read it.

GitHub Copilot shipped Agent Plugins 1.0 GA, per GitHub's changelog, and the ecosystem lock-in objection is gone. One plugin.json now runs across VS Code, Cursor's client, and Copilot CLI, so the "redundant second seat" case against it for Cursor-first teams no longer holds. Pricing held flat at $19 per user for Business. Cursor still edits cleaner on whole-repo multi-file refactors, which is why we landed at 4.5, not higher. Read the review. Try Copilot.