DeepSeek raises $7.4 billion; Trump orders a quantum moonshot

DeepSeek closed its first-ever external funding round at more than $7.4 billion, a landmark for China's best-known AI lab. Founder Liang Wenfeng put in roughly $3 billion himself, while Tencent and battery maker CATL accepted five-year lockups and surrendered all voting rights — only Beijing's National Artificial Intelligence Industry Investment Fund received governance rights and a direct stake. The unusual structure makes explicit what was long implied: DeepSeek's strategic direction now formally favors the Chinese state.

President Trump signed two executive orders aimed at speeding the arrival of useful quantum computers. The first sets a national goal of deploying a "scientifically relevant" quantum machine at a Department of Energy lab by 2028 and backing new quantum sensors and networks. The second pulls the federal deadline for adopting post-quantum cryptography forward from 2035 to December 2031, and directs the National Institute of Standards and Technology to pilot a migration of federal systems by the end of 2027. The orders build on the Commerce Department's recent $2 billion in equity stakes across nine quantum-computing firms.

OpenAI expanded its Daybreak security program with the full release of GPT-5.5-Cyber, which it calls its strongest model yet for finding, validating, and patching software vulnerabilities — it set a new state of the art on the CyberGym benchmark at 85.6 percent. Alongside it, a new "Patch the Planet" effort funds expert researchers to fix flaws in widely used open-source projects and work directly with their maintainers; more than 30 projects have signed on, with Trail of Bits and HackerOne as partners. OpenAI argues its models now find bugs faster than defenders can fix them, so the bottleneck has shifted to patching.

SpaceX agreed to lease AI computing capacity to Reflection AI, an open-source lab founded by former Google DeepMind researchers, for $150 million a month from July through 2029 — up to $6.3 billion in total. Reflection gets Nvidia GB300 chips at SpaceX's Colossus 2 data center near Memphis, Tennessee, the facility xAI built before folding into SpaceX. It joins much larger SpaceX compute deals with Anthropic and Google, turning the company's spare chip inventory into a fast-growing leasing business.

Zhipu AI released the full MIT-licensed weights for GLM-5.2, the coding-first model it teased earlier this month, and independent benchmarks now back the hype. The 753-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model (about 40 billion active) scored 62.1 on SWE-bench Pro — beating GPT-5.5 — and finished within about a point of Claude Opus 4.8 on several long-horizon coding tests, at roughly one-sixth the price. It now tops the open-weights intelligence rankings, a fresh sign that China's open models are closing the gap with frontier US labs.

Chevron signed a 20-year agreement to supply natural-gas-fired electricity to a massive Microsoft AI data center planned near Pecos in West Texas. The project, called Kilby, would start generating power by 2028 and scale to 2.67 gigawatts — enough for more than 530,000 homes — with a first phase estimated at about $7 billion. Chevron is building the plant with Joulent, an energy firm backed by Engine No. 1, and will make a final investment decision later this year. It is the latest sign that AI's power appetite is reshaping where and how electricity gets built.

AI chipmaker Groq confirmed a $650 million funding round, led by the investment firm Disruptive, as it rebuilds after Nvidia's roughly $20 billion deal late last year to license Groq's technology and hire away its founder and much of its top engineering team. Groq is now doubling down on its "neocloud" business — renting out fast inference capacity — and restocking its executive bench. The startup last carried a valuation near $6.9 billion and did not disclose a new one.

General Motors has installed about 50 FANUC robot arms on the assembly line at Factory Zero, its flagship electric-vehicle plant in Detroit, even as roughly 1,300 workers remain on an indefinite layoff that was billed as temporary. The United Auto Workers local says the company could recall idled members instead of automating their jobs. The move crystallizes the labor fight playing out across carmakers as AI-era automation arrives on the factory floor.