TeraWulf signed a 20-year lease with Anthropic for 401 megawatts of critical IT load at its Hawesville, Kentucky campus, worth roughly $19B in contracted revenue — shares jumped as much as 18% on the news, and TeraWulf is selling its majority stake in a separate Texas joint venture to a group led by Fluidstack to fund the build-out. The structure has a frontier lab contracting directly with a power-rich landlord instead of routing through a neocloud or hyperscaler, extending the same logic behind Nvidia's new vendor-financing backstop: long-duration contracted revenue that a developer can borrow against without waiting on a hyperscaler's balance sheet.
Private Companies
Anthropic
Other
Alibaba will bar employees from using Anthropic's Claude starting July 10, citing an alleged security back door; Anthropic separately accused Alibaba of running the largest known distillation attack against its models to date, per CNBC. Neither side has detailed its technical basis. The dispute formalizes an unspoken rivalry over model IP and signals that distillation — training a cheaper model on a frontier lab's outputs — is now an explicit flashpoint in US-China AI competition.
OpenAI
Customer
OpenAI and Anthropic are each offering roughly $0.5M in no-equity compute credits to every YC batch company — about 800 startups a year — with OpenAI adding an optional $1.5M more for equity, per WSJ. One voice-AI founder said he fielded over $3M in competing credit offers; the two labs could distribute up to $800M annually across YC alone. The tactic trades margin now for a locked-in default vendor before startups scale into paying enterprise accounts.
Public Markets
Samsung made more profit last quarter than the previous two years combined. Samsung's preliminary Q2 operating profit rose roughly 19x year-over-year to a record ₩89.4T on AI-memory demand, beating estimates — but shares fell as investors questioned whether hyperscaler capex, not memory pricing, is now the binding constraint on the cycle. The company is now more profitable than NVIDIA.
Emerging
South Korea confirmed the Gwangju military-airport site for its new Honam semiconductor cluster on July 6, with Samsung and SK Hynix committing a combined ₩800T (~$522.5B) under a fast-tracked land and regulatory process activated by presidential order. It is a national-security-scale industrial bet on memory and AI-chip capacity, not a corporate capex decision — the kind of state-backed commitment that can keep HBM and DRAM supply growing faster than either company's own balance sheet would support alone.
Syntiant, the Intel- and Microsoft-backed edge-AI chip maker, publicly filed its S-1 for a Nasdaq listing (ticker SYTN) on July 6, with Citigroup, BofA Securities, and UBS as lead underwriters, per Bloomberg. Syntiant builds a full-stack, ultra-low-power platform for physical AI. The filing shows Q1 revenue down to $64.5M from $66.6M a year earlier and a net loss that widened to $20.9M from $14.1M, against $311M raised to date and a $646.4M valuation from its December 2024 round.
Watch This Week
Friday, July 10
SK Hynix's Nasdaq ADR is set to begin trading after pricing Wednesday, July 9, targeting roughly $28.1B raised at an indicative $158.26 per ADR — trimmed from an earlier ~$29.4B target during the July 6-9 roadshow. It remains the largest Nasdaq listing by a foreign company on record.