Helsing's $1.8 billion defense-AI round + Meta's own AI chip

German defense-tech company Helsing closed a $1.8 billion Series E round, led by existing backers alongside JPMorgan Chase, General Catalyst, Lightspeed, and Iconiq, valuing the four-year-old firm at $18 billion — the biggest defense-startup raise in European history. Helsing builds AI software and hardware that plug into drones, autonomous jets, and battlefield sensors, and is widely framed as Europe's answer to America's Anduril. Demand ran well past the available allocation as capital keeps flooding into software-defined defense.

An internal memo reviewed by Reuters shows Meta plans to begin manufacturing Iris, the fourth generation of its custom MTIA accelerator, in September — designed with Broadcom and built by TSMC. Iris will not replace the Nvidia and AMD GPUs Meta already buys in bulk, but it is meant to shave the cost of scaling to seven gigawatts of compute by year-end and 14 gigawatts in 2027. Meta expects to spend as much as $145 billion on AI infrastructure in 2026 alone. The chip cleared bug testing in roughly six weeks with no major problems.

PixVerse, a Singapore-based AI video-generation startup founded by former ByteDance and Lighthouse Capital executives, extended its Series C to $439 million, pushing its valuation past $2 billion with backing from Alibaba and a long list of Asian funds. The company says it now has more than 150 million registered users and 15 million monthly actives across consumer, filmmaking, and game-world-model product lines that generate clips up to 4K resolution. The raise underscores how much money is pouring into AI video as the category races Sora, Kling, and Runway.

Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella argued that companies buying proprietary AI "pay twice" — once in fees, and again in the proprietary know-how they hand over through prompts, tool calls, and corrections that quietly train someone else's model. His warning lands as the Financial Times reports a wave of firms — Coinbase, Shopify, and Airbnb among them — shifting to open-weight Chinese models like DeepSeek, Alibaba's Qwen, and Zhipu's GLM, which can run 60 to 90 percent cheaper. Coinbase says it nearly halved its AI spending even as usage climbed.

Trading barbs with Elon Musk, OpenAI's Sam Altman poured cold water on the idea of near-term orbital data centers — the vision underpinning much of SpaceX's roughly $2 trillion valuation and Google's "Suncatcher" project. Most specialists agree with him: running AI inference in orbit only pencils out once launches get far cheaper and high-powered satellites can be mass-produced, both likely years away. SpaceX even flagged in its IPO filing that Starship may not reach full reusability soon, which would gut the math. A useful reality check on one of the hottest AI-infrastructure narratives.

Google DeepMind and India's Atal Innovation Mission launched ATL Saathi, a Gemini-powered web app that helps teachers in the country's network of school "tinkering labs" plan projects, deliver micro-lessons, and mentor students across eight languages. The tool is starting as a live pilot in an initial cohort of 100 schools, aimed at cutting educators' administrative load. It is early — no outcome data yet — but it is a concrete deployment built to stretch scarce hands-on STEM-teaching capacity.