OLIX raised a $312M Series B at a $3.3B valuation, adding Arm, Hudson River Trading, and Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings as new investors alongside larger commitments from existing backers Hummingbird Ventures, Plural, and Creandum. The capital funds delivery of OLIX's DX-1 decode accelerator to customers by H2 2027 and scales its X-1 platform, which splits inference across specialized chips for each stage of token production linked by "slow and wide" optical interconnects — a disaggregated bet against the general-purpose GPU handling every stage of the pipeline itself. The round also brought Wise's longtime CFO Matt Briers into the finance seat and Stanford's Nick McKeown, a co-inventor of software-defined networking and P4, onto the board, pairing IPO-track financial discipline with interconnect pedigree as networking becomes as contested a layer as compute. (OLIX)
Public Markets
AWS grew 37% YoY to $42.2B, the fastest pace since 2021, while Amazon's AI and custom-silicon business crossed a $25B annualized run rate — evidence hyperscaler capex is finally converting into cloud revenue, not just sitting as depreciation risk. (Bloomberg)
Alibaba's weekend launch of Qwen3.8-Max — a 2.4-trillion-parameter MoE model with a 1M-token window, priced at $2/$6 per 1M tokens — claims results "second only to Fable 5," a claim resting on a crowdsourced leaderboard, not a published benchmark. (Reuters)
Emerging
Brookfield and NextEra Energy are building a $100B AI data center campus at the Department of Energy's former Paducah, Kentucky uranium-enrichment site, paired with 4.6GW of dedicated on-site generation — a roughly 2GW gas plant plus 2.6GW of battery storage — after DOE selected Brookfield through a November 2025 RFP. It's a template for skipping the grid-interconnection queue entirely by repurposing federal legacy energy sites for gigawatt-scale compute. (Bloomberg)
Watch This Week
Mon Aug 3
onsemi reports Q2 2026 results after the close — a power/analog name whose numbers increasingly track AI-datacenter buildout more than auto and industrial demand. (StockTitan)
Tue Aug 4
AMD reports fiscal Q2 2026 results after the close, the first full-quarter read on Helios rack and MI400-series shipments since July's Advancing AI event. (StockTitan)
Tue Aug 4
Arista Networks and Astera Labs both report Q2 2026 results after the close the same day as AMD, a combined read on networking and PCIe/interconnect retimer demand inside the same GPU-cluster buildout. (StockTitan)