This Week in AI: AI Startups Hit Fundraising Gold

Fortunes are being spent in artificial intelligence (AI), with Perplexity, Thinking Machines and Anthropic attracting billions from investors. Meanwhile, Google, Meta and Blackstone have pledged to spend billions building AI data centers. Here is this week’s top news.

Leading AI Startups Net Billions in Fundraising

AI search startup Perplexity is now worth $18 billion following its latest funding round of $100 million, according to Bloomberg.

Capital raised by Perplexity, which has tripled its valuation over the past year, point to robust investor interest in the competitive AI search market especially for leading startups. Apple reportedly was interested in acquiring Perplexity.

Another big round this week came from Thinking Machines, which was founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati. It has raised $2 billion in a round that values the startup at $10 billion.

“We’re building multimodal AI that works with how you naturally interact with the world – through conversation, through sight, through the messy way we collaborate,” Murati said in a post on X.

The startup plans to unveil its first product in the next two months. It will include a “significant open source component” to help researchers and startups developing custom models, Murati said.

Meanwhile, reports surfaced that Anthropic is being approached by investors whose funding offers could value the startup at $100 billion. Earlier this year, valuation hit $61.5 billion after a $3.5 billion fundraise.

Big Tech Allocates Over $100 Billion to Build AI Data Centers

Google, Meta, Blackstone and CoreWeave plan to invest billions of dollars building AI data centers as demand for computing power grows.

At the Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit, which was attended by President Donald Trump, Google announced it would spend $25 billion over two years in the PJM grid region — an integrated power pool serving 65 million users across 13 states and Washington, D.C. — and has partnered with Brookfield to modernize hydroelectric plants in the state.

Also at the summit, Blackstone said it would invest $25 billion in data centers and energy infrastructure in the state, partnering with PPL to add natural gas power capacity. The private equity giant said Pennsylvania offers low-cost energy and boasts 20% of U.S. natural gas production.

CoreWeave joined in, committing $6 billion to build an AI data center in Lancaster, Pa. Last month, AWS said it was planning to spend $20 billion to expand its cloud computing and AI infrastructure in Pennsylvania.

Separately, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said this week that the company expects to spend “hundreds of billions” of dollars to build multi-gigawatt data centers, including Prometheus and Hyperion, to support its new superintelligence team.

Read more: Google, Meta and Others Pledge Billions of Dollars to Build AI Data Centers

OpenAI to Take a Slice of Chatgpt’s Shopping Revenue

OpenAI is reportedly planning to earn commissions on eCommerce sales made through ChatGPT, according to the Financial Times. The company already features product listings with links to online retailers and partnered with Shopify in April.

OpenAI also aims to integrate a checkout system directly into ChatGPT, allowing users to complete purchases within the platform. Merchants would pay a fee for sales made this way.

This strategy marks a shift from OpenAI’s current revenue model, which relies mainly on subscriptions, and could enable monetization of its free service. The move also poses a challenge to Google’s dominance in online search and shopping, as more users turn to AI tools for these tasks.

See here: OpenAI Seeks Piece of ChatGPT-Driven eCommerce Sales

Google Developing a Unified Chrome and Android Interface

Google may be preparing to merge ChromeOS and Android into a single platform, according to comments by Sameer Samat, president of the Android Ecosystem, in an interview with TechRadar.

When Samat saw the journalist interviewing him using a MacBook Pro, Apple Watch and iPhone together, he wondered by the piecemeal efforts.

“I asked because we’re going to be combining ChromeOS and Android into a single platform, and I am very interested in how people are using their laptops these days and what they’re getting done,” Samat said.

Samat said users switching from iPhones often realize they’ve been missing key features. Industry insiders suggest this could disrupt Google’s ad model and redefine digital brand visibility.

More here: Google Reportedly Melding Chrome OS and Android Into One Platform

AWS Unveils AI Agent Marketplace

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has launched “AI Agents and Tools,” a new category in its Marketplace designed to help businesses easily find, deploy and manage AI agents.

Announced at this week’s AWS Summit in New York, the marketplace features over 900 agents from providers such as Anthropic, Salesforce, IBM, PwC and Stripe.

AWS said its platform stands out for offering services, agents, guardrails and knowledge bases in one place, along with AI-powered semantic search. Use cases include procurement, compliance and document intelligence. Both free and paid agents are available.

Related: AWS Unveils AI Agent Marketplace as ‘One-Stop Shop’ for Enterprise Deployment