US takes equity in 9 quantum firms; DeepMind opens APAC 'AI for the Planet' accelerator

The Department of Commerce signed letters of intent on Thursday to provide $2.013 billion in federal incentives to nine quantum companies — IBM alone receives $1 billion, GlobalFoundries gets $375 million, and seven computing firms (D-Wave, Rigetti, Quantinuum, PsiQuantum, Atom Computing, Infleqtion, and Diraq) get between $38 million and $100 million each. Unlike traditional CHIPS Act grants, the department takes a minority, non-controlling equity stake in each company "to enhance the return for the U.S. taxpayer," mirroring the structure of last year's Intel deal. Secretary Howard Lutnick framed the package as building "thousands of high-paying American jobs while advancing American quantum capabilities."

Google DeepMind opened applications Thursday for the inaugural DeepMind Accelerator program in Asia Pacific, a three-month initiative pairing startups, research teams, and nonprofits with DeepMind engineers to apply frontier AI and "science AI" models to nature, climate, agriculture, and energy problems. The program runs out of an in-person bootcamp in Singapore, with DeepMind citing a recent KPMG-Google study that found the region is both "a global engine for economic growth" and "highly vulnerable to climate change," with green technology not scaling fast enough to keep pace with rising environmental risks.

Spotify and Universal Music Group announced a licensing deal Thursday that will let Premium subscribers create AI-generated covers and remixes of Universal artists' songs, with revenue shared back to participating artists. The deal is built on three principles — "consent, credit, and compensation," per Spotify co-CEO Alex Norström — and is the music industry's most prominent AI-licensing framework to date, contrasting sharply with Suno and Udio, which are being sued by the major labels for training on their catalogs without permission. Neither launch date nor the list of participating artists has been announced.

Spotify Labs unveiled Studio, a desktop app whose AI agent browses the web and reads users' calendar, inbox, and notes to generate personalized podcasts, briefings, and playlists — explicitly framed as a competitor to Google's NotebookLM. The same Investor Day also rolled out an AI Q&A feature for Premium podcast listeners in the US, Sweden, and Ireland and a prompt-driven Personal Podcasts generator. Separately, Spotify for Authors will open an ElevenLabs-powered audiobook narration tool in invite-only beta next month, letting self-publishing authors generate audiobooks they can distribute on any platform.

The White House pulled a planned executive order on Thursday afternoon that would have established a voluntary process for AI companies to share advanced models with the federal government for up to ninety days of safety review before public release. Trump told reporters he "didn't like certain aspects of it" and worried it would "get in the way" of US AI leadership against China. Axios reports that AI adviser David Sacks, along with Meta's Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, pressed concerns in the hours before the scheduled signing. The push for the order intensified after Anthropic unveiled its withheld Mythos model, which the lab says can exploit cybersecurity vulnerabilities at an unprecedented pace.

China's DeepSeek is advancing a 70 billion yuan (about $10 billion) financing round at a pre-money valuation near $45 billion, Bloomberg reported Friday — the first time the lab has accepted outside capital after being self-funded by founder Liang Wenfeng's High-Flyer quant fund. The likely investor list includes Beijing's National Artificial Intelligence Industry Investment Fund, Tencent, IDG Capital, and Monolith Capital, with the state-backed fund expected to contribute about 10 billion yuan. Liang told prospective investors the lab will keep developing open-source models and pursue artificial general intelligence rather than chase near-term commercialization, marking one of the largest state-aligned bets on AGI to date outside the US.

Hark, the secretive AI lab founded by Figure AI and Archer Aviation founder Brett Adcock in late 2025, raised $700 million in a Series A round, led by Parkway Venture Capital at a $6 billion post-money valuation. Backers include Nvidia, AMD Ventures, Intel Capital, Qualcomm Ventures, ARK Invest, Brookfield, Greycroft, and Salesforce Ventures. The company plans to release multimodal models this summer and custom hardware after that, pitching a consumer-first "universal AI interface" rather than developer tools. Design director Abidur Chowdhury, formerly of Apple, told TechCrunch he hadn't "seen anything that feels like something that will really help the normal person."