Before diving into today’s brief… check out this week’s episode of The Compute 100 with Alexander Ksendzovsky and Jonathan Pomeraniec, Co-Founders of The Biological Computing Company.
Alex and Jon, co-founders of The Biological Computing Company, joined us on the podcast today to talk about the intelligence of our brains, how evolution has built the most efficient computer, and how they will commercialize their work. Today, alongside our podcast, the team has launched a demo of how their biological systems have improved the open-source video generation model OASIS. This demo comes ahead of a product launch this fall, where TBC will be launching the world’s first neurally-optimized video generation model. Check out the podcast episode and give the demo a try!
Eliyan closed a $145M Series C on July 29 at a $1B valuation — its first at unicorn status — with Seligman Ventures leading and Cisco Investments and Lumentum joining as new strategic backers; Seligman's Umesh Padval takes a board seat. The company built its business on electrical chiplet-to-chiplet interconnect (NuLink PHYs, NuGear chiplets) and is using the new capital to push into electro-optical links, the layer AI accelerator clusters now depend on to scale past the reach and power limits of copper. Strategic capital from a networking incumbent and an optical-components supplier reads as a customer-and-supply-chain vote on which interconnect approach wins as rack-scale AI systems multiply GPU counts faster than electrical signaling can keep up. (SiliconANGLE)
Private Companies
Nscale
Other
Nscale agreed to acquire Anyscale, the Ray-based platform for scaling AI training, inference and reinforcement learning across GPU clusters, in a deal reported at $1.65B; terms weren't officially disclosed. Anyscale's roughly 200-person team joins Nscale but keeps its own brand and existing customers, who remain free to choose their own infrastructure; Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley advised Nscale, with close expected in the second half of 2026. Anyscale grew revenue 70% sequentially last quarter. The deal moves Nvidia-backed Nscale up the stack from raw GPU supply into the orchestration software layer engineers actually touch — a full-stack bet against neoclouds still selling compute alone. (Reuters)
Extropic
Other
Extropic signed a $75M letter of intent with the U.S. Department of Commerce, one of seven awards in an $874M CHIPS and Science Act R&D package announced July 29, with Commerce taking a minority, non-controlling equity stake as a condition of funding. The money funds Z1.5, a domestically-manufactured successor to Extropic's Z1 thermodynamic sampling unit — a probabilistic-computing architecture pitched as an alternative to GPU-style acceleration for certain AI and optimization workloads. It's a rare case of the federal government underwriting a non-consensus compute paradigm at the policy level, with an onshoring condition attached, rather than leaving that bet to venture capital alone. (NIST)
ChipAgents
Fundraise
ChipAgents raised a $60M Series A2 extension led by B Capital, with Micron and MediaTek returning as investors alongside Ericsson, bringing its six-month-old Series A past $130M. CEO William Wang confirmed an expanded Nvidia collaboration to build a specialized model for chip-design verification, without saying whether Nvidia has invested, and the company says it now has deployments across more than 120 semiconductor companies with annual recurring revenue up 6x. That's a more substantive disclosure than a typical EDA-automation raise: real customer count and revenue growth attached to the thesis that AI agents compress chip design and verification cycles as complexity rises. (BusinessWire)
Public Markets
SK Hynix's operating profit rose 557% to ₩60.54T (~$41.6B), a record, but missed the ₩64T consensus after HBM4 shipments lagged — proof memory names are now priced on forward AI-demand assumptions, not trailing beats. (CNBC)
Q3 revenue beat at $9.95B, but Q4 EPS guidance of $2.05–$2.25 missed the $2.36 consensus as handset revenue fell 20% and Apple's decline is set to accelerate — leaving Qualcomm's unproven data-center AI chip bet to backfill a shrinking mobile franchise. (Reuters)
Watch This Week
Thu Jul 30