SambaNova closed the first tranche of a $1B Series F at an $11B valuation — roughly 5x the mark it set five months ago — led by General Atlantic, with Intel Capital, BlackRock, T. Rowe Price, Capital Group, and Qatar Investment Authority among the backers, according to TechCrunch and CNBC. The same day, JPMorganChase named SambaNova its inference-infrastructure partner, committing to run secure, on-premises inference on the company's SN40L and SN50 systems — converting a thesis argued mostly in pitch decks, that purpose-built inference silicon can win named enterprise customers against Nvidia's dominance in the segment, into a data point with a real bank attached. It is also a sharp reversal: SambaNova was reportedly exploring a sale this spring after a difficult fundraising stretch.
Private Companies
Nscale
Fundraise
Nscale closed a $900M revolving credit facility on July 7 to fund AI data-center buildout across the US, Europe, and Asia-Pacific, syndicated by J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, MUFG, and eight other banks, per DataCenterDynamics. It is the company's fourth financing in six months, after a $2B Series C, a $1.4B delayed-draw term loan, and $790M for its Norway campus. The sequence — equity, then term loan, then revolver — is becoming standard for neoclouds financing GPU capacity like project finance, with debt now carrying more of the buildout than equity.
Crusoe
Launch
Crusoe launched Serverless Fine-Tuning and Self-Serve Inference Deployments inside its Crusoe Intelligence Foundry platform on July 7, letting ML teams move from proprietary data to production models without managing infrastructure. The launch lands the same week Bloomberg reported Crusoe is in talks to raise roughly $3B at close to $30B — nearly triple its prior valuation — backed by supply deals with Meta and Oracle and a claimed 4.9GW under contract against a 40GW pipeline. Moving up-stack into fine-tuning and inference serving puts Crusoe in direct competition with Together and Fireworks for the margin sitting above raw GPU capacity.
Oratomic
Fundraise
Oratomic, a Caltech spinout building neutral-atom quantum computers, raised a $300M Series A on July 7, co-led by ARCH Venture Partners, Spark Capital, and Khosla Ventures, with Bezos Expeditions, Index Ventures, and General Catalyst among the backers, per The Quantum Insider. The company argues fault-tolerant, utility-scale quantum computers may need roughly 10,000 reconfigurable qubits rather than the millions often cited elsewhere, and aims to demonstrate one before decade's end. It is a large, early bet that architecture, not just qubit count, is the unlock for practical quantum computing — and a reminder that compute is not converging on a single substrate.
Public Markets
Samsung's record Q2 profit, up roughly 19x year-over-year on AI-memory demand, triggered a sector-wide selloff rather than a rally — Micron, SanDisk, and Western Digital all fell in sympathy as investors questioned whether even record memory profits justify current valuations, per 24/7 Wall St.
Emerging
DeepSeek is designing its own AI chip focused on inference, according to a Reuters exclusive citing three people familiar with the effort — underway for about a year, with the Hangzhou lab quietly expanding its chip-engineering team without public job postings. US export bans on advanced Nvidia chips and overseas foundry access leave SMIC as the likely domestic fab, and reported curbs on Chinese access to high-bandwidth memory add a second manufacturing constraint. DeepSeek has not confirmed the project, and Reuters' sourcing is anonymous, but the move would put a leading Chinese lab in the same vertical-integration posture as OpenAI, which unveiled its Broadcom-designed Jalapeño inference chip last month, and Anthropic, reported in April to be weighing custom silicon of its own. Watch for SMIC capacity commitments or hiring disclosures that would corroborate the reporting, and for what it implies about Huawei's Ascend line, which DeepSeek currently uses for training despite reported performance issues.
Watch This Week
Wednesday, July 9