Morning Scan

The week closes on a familiar note: chips everywhere, money in motion, and AI eating another industry's lunch before it finishes its coffee. If there's a thread running through Friday, it's that the infrastructure layer — compute, capital, and talent — is consolidating fast, and the people closest to the models are the ones placing the biggest bets.

$48B — Amazon's total planned investment in India by 2030 after adding another $13B this week, making it one of the largest single-country cloud commitments in the company's history. (The Next Web)

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Connected World

OpenAI and Broadcom Announce Chip Designed for LLM Inference at Scale

OpenAI's first custom silicon — dubbed Jalapeno — is a direct move to reduce its dependence on Nvidia for the inference workloads that actually make ChatGPT run. (Ars Technica)

SambaNova Set to Raise $800M–$1B at ~$10B Valuation

A 5x valuation jump from February signals that the market for alternative AI chips is no longer a niche — it's a land grab. (The Information)

Arm Now Claims 50%+ of the Hyperscale Cloud Market

Arm's EVP says AI data center demand is what pushed it past the majority threshold — a remarkable position for a company that licenses rather than manufactures. (Nikkei Asia)

Qualcomm Designing China-Specific Data Center Chip Within US Export Rules

Rather than ceding the Chinese market entirely, Qualcomm is threading the export-control needle with a purpose-built chip — a playbook others will watch closely. (Nikkei Asia)

LineShine Is Fastest Supercomputer at Over 2 Exaflops

The new compute ceiling just moved again — 2 exaflops is a number that would have been science fiction a decade ago. (Hackaday)

Connected World

Mirendil Raises $200M Seed at $1B Valuation (paywall)

Former Anthropic researchers raising a $200M seed round — at a unicorn valuation, before a product ships — is the clearest sign yet that AI talent can now monetize reputation alone. (Wall Street Journal)

Trase Raises $107M Seed for AI Agent Infrastructure in Health Care and Defense

Another nine-figure seed round, this time for the plumbing underneath AI agents in two of the most compliance-heavy industries imaginable. (Axios)

Alan Raises €480M at €5.5B Valuation, Targeting €1B+ ARR by Year-End (paywall)

Europe's most-watched digital health insurer is scaling fast enough to make legacy insurers genuinely uncomfortable. (Financial Times)

“How Larry Ellison's $45M donation brought Ellison deeper into Trump's circle — helping Oracle and his son's WBD acquisition.” — Wall Street Journal

Connected World

Two More Gemini Researchers Leaving Google for Anthropic

The talent drain from Google to Anthropic is becoming a pattern, not an incident — and Anthropic keeps getting the researchers who built what they're now competing against. (The Next Web)

Google Lowering Play Store Fees and Allowing Alternative Payments Worldwide

Epic's lawsuit is delivering what years of developer complaints could not: a structural change to how Google monetizes its app marketplace, globally. (MacRumors)

Utah Senate President Who Championed Data Center Near Great Salt Lake Loses Primary

Voter backlash over water-intensive infrastructure in a drought state just claimed a senior Republican legislator — a data point the rest of the industry shouldn't ignore. (New York Times)

Hugging Face Hosts Nudification Tools Targeting US Political Figures

The open-model hosting platform's content moderation problem just escalated from theoretical to very, very concrete. (Transformer)

Connected World

GTA VI Will Cost $80 Without a Physical Disc

Rockstar is betting that the most anticipated game in a decade can reset consumer price expectations for AAA titles — and they're probably right. (Ars Technica)