• Livestream shopping app Whatnot raised a $545M Series G led by Iconiq, Lightspeed, and Avra at a $20B valuation, up from an $11.5B valuation in October 2025 (Allie Garfinkle/Fortune)
• Athens-based Omilia, which builds self-learning AI agents that work across different customer contact points, raised a $67M Series B led by Expedition Growth (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)
• Sources: the US Commerce Department's BIS is reviewing how Chinese AI companies access Nvidia chips overseas, including by legally renting foreign data centers (Mackenzie Hawkins/Bloomberg)
• The White House imposes a series of price floors and a 15% tariff on products made from polysilicon, a chip raw material primarily produced by China (Reuters)
• Atlassian CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes says he will buy $250M of company shares after strong Q4 results eased fears that AI could threaten its business model (Nic Fildes/Financial Times)
• SK Hynix plans a $38B chipmaking expansion in South Korea, including a new ~$24.7B DRAM facility in Yongin and a ~$13.3B NAND fabrication plant in Cheongju (Yoolim Lee/Bloomberg)
• Analysis: Google DeepMind has lost frontier-model momentum amid leadership and RL talent departures, with Google Cloud emerging as a winner with more compute (SemiAnalysis)
• Sources: Google's AI shakeup is a seismic shift in the works for months and cements Sergey Brin's influence, after execs became frustrated with Demis Hassabis (Financial Times)
• Sources: up to five people tied to US Cyber Command died by suicide from early June to early July 2026, prompting it to flag a potential suicide cluster (Bloomberg)
• Filing: ex-a16z partner Bryan Kim is forming venture firm Mido Capital; sources: he plans to raise ~$100M for a fund backing early-stage AI and other startups (Yuliya Chernova/Wall Street Journal)
• Sources: ByteDance is pretraining an AI model with up to 10T parameters, roughly 3x larger than Kimi K3 and larger than the 8T estimate for Anthropic's Mythos 5 (Financial Times)
• Sources: an addendum to the bipartisan Clarity Act would force President Trump to divest from crypto businesses, letting him defer paying taxes on the gains (Bloomberg)
• Sydney-based AI data center company Firmus raised $2B in funding from Coatue, Nvidia, and others at a $10.5B post-money valuation, up from $5.5B in April (Nichiket Sunil/Reuters)
• Naïve, which provides infrastructure for AI agents to handle most business operations, raised a $28.5M Series A led by Nexus, bringing its total funding to $32M (Ram Iyer/TechCrunch)
• Sources: Alibaba plans to ask heavy commercial users of its next Qwen open model for a share of revenue; Moonshot's Kimi K3 requires up to a 30% revenue share (Reuters)
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