Weekly Download #19

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This week, Silicon Valley proved that throwing money at AI infrastructure is easy; using it efficiently is hard. OpenAI's $400B Stargate looks less impressive when you realize 75% of the industry's GPUs maybe sitting idle.

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OpenAI just completed a $6.6B secondary sale at a $500B valuation (up $200B since earlier this year), making it the most valuable and worth more than SpaceX and ByteDance.

At the same time, they signed deals for 6GW of AMD GPUs and getting Samsung and SK to commit 900,000 DRAM wafer starts per month to feed their infrastructure addiction:

The Bottom Line: OpenAI is worth half a trillion dollars while burning $13B annually, and their solution is to get AMD, Samsung, and entire countries' semiconductor industries to bet everything on AGI arriving before the money runs out.

BlackRock's Global Infrastructure Partners is closing in on a $40B deal to acquire Aligned Data Centers:

Aligned just raised $12B to scale from 600MW operational to 5GW total. That's not a tech play; that's infrastructure empire-building on a scale that would make railroad barons jealous.

Reality Check: When Wall Street's biggest infrastructure fund treats GPU warehouses like core real estate assets, we're not betting on algorithms anymore; we're betting on who owns the land.

Microsoft just committed over $33B to neocloud providers like Nebius, CoreWeave, and Lambda:

Translation: The company that literally invented "cloud computing at scale" is now someone else's biggest tenant. They're renting capacity that's already live while their own data centers are still PowerPoint slides.

Meanwhile: Google's quietly doing the same thing but keeping it low-key, and Amazon hasn't announced similar moves yet; they're either not desperate enough or have better PR.

AI infrastructure spending will blow past $300B in 2025, but here's the dirty secret: over 75% of organizations run their GPUs below 70% utilization:

Reality Check: Companies are panic-buying H100s, then discovering they don't have the data pipelines, orchestration systems, or basic competence to actually use them. This isn't an infrastructure arms race; it's an infrastructure hoarding crisis.

Apple shelved development of a cheaper Vision Pro to chase Meta's smart glasses:

The Bottom Line: When you're Apple and you're following instead of leading, that's not strategy; that's panic dressed up in Jony Ive's minimalist packaging. They spent years mocking Zuckerberg's metaverse, only to realize consumers want AI assistants that don't make them look like they're training for the Olympics.

Meta's foundational AI research lab FAIR changed its publishing rules, and the reaction was nuclear:

Translation: Meta can't decide if it's a tech company that does research or a research institution that makes products. This strategic confusion is precisely what happens when you're terrified of both OpenAI and your own researchers.

A federal judge has just dismantled Google's search empire, ordering it to end exclusive deals, including the $26 billion annual payment to Apple, and share its precious search data with competitors.

What Google Lost:

What Google Kept:

The Kicker: The court specifically cited "competition from generative AI" as a reason to limit remedies. Google spent decades building an impenetrable search monopoly, only to have both regulators and ChatGPT attack it simultaneously.

🧠 Wafer-Scale Wizards' Mega Funding Spree: Cerebras Systems raised $1.1B in a Series G round at an $8.1B valuation, led by Fidelity Management. In the AI hardware arms race, they're proving that massive silicon can translate to even more massive investment checks.

🚀 Supabase's Open-Source Rocket Fuel: Raised $100M in Series E at a $5B valuation, bringing total funding to over $500M since 2020 with 4M developers onboard. Turns out, building an open-source Firebase alternative is worth more than just street cred in the AI-powered dev world.

🔍 PostHog's Unicorn Leap into AI Analytics: PostHog raised $75M in Series E, valuing the open-source analytics platform at $1.4B and officially joining the unicorn club. Who knew tracking product metrics could be a ticket to the billion-dollar startup carnival?

🧠 Unconventional's $5B Pre-Product Payday: Former Databricks VP Naveen Rao is raising $1B led by a16z at a $5B valuation for his AI hardware startup that hasn't shipped a product yet. Apparently "new substrate for intelligence" is worth $5B in PowerPoint form.

🎰 AI Devours 52.5% of All VC Money: A Historic First: VCs have pumped $192.7B into AI startups in 2025, marking the first time ever that over half of all VC flows to a single industry. The remaining $174B gets split between healthcare, fintech, climate tech, and every other sector combined. Last time VCs went this all-in? The dot-com era.

✈️ European AI Startups Take American Money, Keep the Accent: US VCs invested $14.2B in European AI companies this year, as founders bypass local investors who can't match Silicon Valley's check sizes. With American VCs raising 10x more capital than European counterparts ($50B vs $5B for AI alone), Europe's "digital sovereignty" dreams are getting Delaware C-corps.

🌏 Asia's VC Market Cuts in Half as Non-AI Startups Starve: Asian VC cratered to $48.9B in nine months, barely half of 2024's total. China hit decade lows with Q2 dropping to $4.7B, while Japan and India only grew in AI/deeptech. The money didn't disappear; it just decided Asia's non-AI startups aren't worth the flight.

🚀 OpenAI's Rocket Past SpaceX: Staff sold $6.6B in shares at a $500B valuation, making it the world's most valuable startup ahead of SpaceX's $400-425B. Turns out chatbots that write code beat actual rockets to space—at least on paper.

🎮 EA's Debt-Fueled Future: EA's $55B acquisition saddled the gaming giant with $20B in debt that will consume a big portion of its cash flow, with even bullish analysts expecting major layoffs. Turns out the real game over is when your business model becomes 'make games, pay bankers.'

⚡ Fermi's Zero-Revenue $19B Power Trip: Data center REIT Fermi, co-founded by former Energy Secretary Rick Perry, popped 55% on its Nasdaq debut to a $19.3B valuation, less than a year after founding and with zero revenue.

🌍 DoorDash's £2.9B Overseas Delivery: DoorDash closed its £2.9B (~$3.9B) Deliveroo acquisition on October 2.  Miki Kuusi, the co-founder of 2022 acquisition Wolt, was installed as the new CEO after founder Will Shu's exit.

Here's a roundup of notable recent funding rounds across various sectors:

Check out our Vision to Venture: Our 3-Month Fundraising Sprint. It's a hands-on program where we work with you to build your complete pitch kit, create your investor target list, and coach you weekly through real investor interactions.

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OpenAI just became the most valuable startup in history while committing nearly a trillion dollars between its valuation and infrastructure spending, all for a company that loses money on every query.

When you're burning enough electricity to power Connecticut and your business model is "AGI will save us," you're either witnessing the birth of the future or the most spectacular crater capitalism has ever dug.

Till next time!

P.S. Raised this week, and we missed you? Want to be featured? Have tips or funding questions? Reply or DM us as we’re here to help.

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