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Aug 24, 2026
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Supported by
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Welcome back! Prices for Nvidia’s Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin chip systems are set to rise about 17%. Alibaba is looking to raise $10 billion in a share sale to fund its AI investments. Nvidia is preparing to lead a multibillion-dollar funding round for Perplexity.
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Alibaba Group said Sunday that it is looking to raise 80 billion Hong Kong dollars ($10.2 billion) through a major share placement to fund its fast-growing AI investments. The Chinese tech giant, listed in New York and Hong Kong, is selling shares to investors outside the U.S. The deal is already oversubscribed due to interest from sovereign wealth funds and other international investors, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. Alibaba, which develops Qwen large language models and operates China’s largest cloud computing service, is accelerating its investments as it competes with ByteDance, Tencent and other Chinese AI firms in a fierce domestic AI race. In the quarter through June, Alibaba’s capital expenditures surged 75% from a year earlier to nearly $10 billion on aggressive AI infrastructure spending. Alibaba is betting that its investments will pay off in the long run. In the June quarter, the company’s revenue from its “AI cloud and compute services” business segment—which includes AI cloud infrastructure services, AI model services and applications such as coding tools—grew 45%. Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu said earlier this month that the company expects the annualized revenue run rate for its AI-related products to reach $10 billion in the current quarter through September, up from $7.3 billion in the previous quarter.
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Nvidia acquired a minority stake in Cloverleaf Infrastructure, its third equity investment in rapid succession in firms that secure real estate and electricity access for data centers in the U.S. The move is part of Nvidia’s race to lock up data center capacity for its full AI hardware suite before its rivals do, and to try to avoid a scenario in which its chips will sit idle because facilities aren’t ready to take them in, The Information reported. Nvidia separately is preparing to lead a multibillion-dollar funding round in Perplexity, the AI search firm-turned-AI agent provider whose revenue growth has been on a tear this year, The Information reported. The move shows Nvidia’s continuing role as the central bank of the AI sector that is largely dependent on its hardware.
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The Department of Justice said Friday that TikTok and its parent company ByteDance have agreed to pay $400 million to settle a lawsuit regarding their alleged violation of federal children’s privacy laws. The DOJ originally filed its complaint in 2024, alleging that TikTok had violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act by allowing children aged under 13 to join the platform and by gathering their personal information without parental consent. The settlement with the DOJ removes another obstacle for TikTok in the U.S. The company, which had previously faced the threat of a ban in the U.S., reached a deal late last year to sell the vast majority of its U.S. data security subsidiary to a group of U.S.-led investors. That deal allowed the video app to avoid a ban and continue its business in the U.S. “TikTok has undergone significant changes to its ownership, management, compliance functions, and privacy practices,” the DOJ said in a statement explaining the settlement. “The company has implemented extensive measures designed to strengthen safeguards for younger users, improve age-related controls, and enhance parental oversight,” it said.
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Kaylin Voss, OpenAI’s vice president of sales in the Americas, has resigned a week after her former boss, Denise Dresser, left the company, according to a person familiar with the matter. Voss had been at OpenAI for just five months. Dresser, who was chief revenue officer, had left after nine months at OpenAI. Like Dresser, Voss had come from Salesforce. Voss was the chief revenue officer of Slack and one of the executives in charge of Salesforce’s primary AI product, Agentforce. She will be returning to Salesforce, CEO Marc Benioff said in a post on X. Voss was one of multiple former Salesforce executives recruited by Dresser to build OpenAI’s enterprise sales team, as the AI firm tried to diversify from a consumer-focused chatbot. Dresser tripled the size of OpenAI’s sales team, with enterprise sales accelerating following OpenAI’s release of its latest model, GPT-5.6. The departures of Dresser and Voss have prompted other people on the sales team to consider resigning, the person said. Multiple OpenAI executives stepped down recently, including Brad Lightcap, who was most recently in charge of “special projects,” CEO of AGI deployment Fidji Simo, and others. OpenAI spokespeople were not immediately available for comment.
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OpenAI explored its own investment in or acquisition of Lancium, the power developer behind its Stargate facility in Abilene, Tex., last quarter, The Information reported Friday. Ultimately, Nvidia invested billions of dollars in the firm. The OpenAI interest shows the length to which the AI model makers are going to ensure they have ready access to the computer servers necessary to run AI models—from chips to the power feeding the data centers. Rival Anthropic, for instance, is launching a new entity with Singapore sovereign wealth fund GIC and Australia’s Macquarie Asset Management to develop, operate and lease AI data centers. Nvidia has emerged as a prolific backer of AI startups as well as nearly every part of AI infrastructure, from the cloud firms such as CoreWeave that buy its AI chips to the data centers that house the chips and the firms that provide crucial power supplies. On Friday, it announced that it was taking a stake in Cloverleaf Infrastructure, which provides and sells land options to other developers. The announcement follows the news Monday that | | |
