|
|
|
Jun 16, 2026
|
|
|
|
|
Supported by
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Happy Tuesday! DeepSeek closes a $7 billion-plus funding round with an unusual deal structure. Anthropic and the White House discuss a resolution to the export controls on the startup's latest AI models. Fox is buying Roku for $22 billion.
|
|
|
|
Chinese AI lab DeepSeek has closed its first funding round that raised more than 50 billion yuan ($7.4 billion) under an unusual deal structure, The Information reported. The funding round, which values the large-language model developer at more than $50 billion, requires investors to put their capital into a limited partnership managed by DeepSeek CEO Liang Wenfeng, instead of DeepSeek itself, as a way for Liang to ensure he retains absolute control of the company. It also imposes a five-year lockup on all investors’ shares, during which they can’t sell their stakes. The only exception is China’s National Artificial Intelligence Industry Investment Fund, which is investing 1 billion yuan directly into DeepSeek without being subject to the lock-up, and enjoys voting rights at the company. Liang personally is writing the biggest check in the round, 20 billion yuan, followed by Tencent’s 10 billion yuan. Chinese battery giant Contemporary Amperex Technology, better known as CATL, is investing 5 billion yuan, with e-commerce company JD.com, videogame publisher NetEase and venture-capital firm IDG Capital each contributing 3 billion yuan.
|
|
|
|
Anthropic senior leaders met with top Trump administration officials on Monday to discuss a resolution to a White House directive that caused the AI startup to suspend access to its latest models, according to a company spokesperson. A spokesperson for the White House did not respond to a request for comment, but an official confirmed earlier that Anthropic was set to meet with administration officials from the Department of Commerce. The Trump administration imposed the export control directive on Friday, prompting Anthropic to cut off access to its latest models to all customers, as well as foreign nationals who work at the lab. The White House action came after Amazon CEO Andy Jassy and other tech leaders raised concerns with the administration over potential security vulnerabilities in Anthropic’s models, The Information previously reported. Anthropic has downplayed the vulnerabilities, describing them as “simple” and prevalent in other publicly available models. Monday’s discussions did not yet yield a resolution, though the Anthropic spokesperson said in a statement that “both parties are working quickly to get this resolved.” Politico reported that the talks included Chris Fall, the head of the Department of Commerce’s Center for AI Standards and Innovation, a small agency that has been rebranded and downsized under the Trump administration. President Joe Biden originally established the office as the U.S. Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute.
|
|
|
|
The Murdoch family’s Fox is buying Roku for $22 billion in cash and stock, or $160 a share, giving Roku shareholders an exit at the highest price at which the stock has traded since the 2020-2022 Covid-fueled surge. In recent years Roku has traded mostly below $100 a share. Roku, which sells streaming device makers, makes most of its money selling ads that run on its eponymously named streaming channel as well as in other streaming services that air on the Roku platform. Roku’s ad growth has been steady—it grew 13% to $2.3 billion in 2025—but the streaming ad market is relatively small and extremely competitive. That raises questions about how much more growth Roku could achieve. The deal expands Fox’s portfolio, which now mostly consists of broadcast TV and the Fox News Channel, by giving it greater exposure to the streaming TV ad market. Right now, Fox’s main exposure to streaming is through the free Tubi service, which is also reliant on ads.
|
|
|
|
Nvidia said Monday it plans to raise $25 billion in new debt even as the AI chip leader generates tens of billions of dollars in cash every quarter. It will be the company’s first corporate bond sale since 2021, when it raised $5 billion. In doing so, Nvidia is effectively following other large AI businesses that have issued debt or financial backstops for the development of AI data centers that house chips including Nvidia’s. Key Nvidia customers Amazon, Oracle and Meta and Google are also each raising more than $25 billion via high-grade bond sales this year to help fund their data center expansion as their free cash flows decline. An Nvidia spokesperson said in a statement that the company intends to “use the net proceeds from this [debt] offering for general corporate purposes, including repayment and refinancing of outstanding notes.” Nvidia currently carries $11 billion in total debt, including around $7.5 billion in long-term debt—meaning the new offering will more than double its relativey small debt load. The bond sale will be in seven tranches maturing between 2028 and 2056, per a Monday regulatory filing. Nvidia may use some of the debt for investments as well: While Nvidia isn’t building AI data centers itself, it’s spending big to make the chips to fill those facilities and is increasingly investing capital in its customers as well as backstopping some data center leases. For instance it committed to put $30 billion into OpenAI’s latest funding and plans to backstop the AI maker’s lease payments at a large facility in Ohio. In the quarter ending in April, Nvidia invested $19 billion in private companies and infrastructure funds, including AI model makers, it said in a regulatory filing.
|
|
|
|
Salesforce has agreed to buy Fin, a startup that develops customer agents formerly known as Intercom, for $3.6 billion, as the software giant hopes to win new businesses from enterprises to adopt its own AI offering. The sale price is a premium to Fin’s last estimated valuation of $1.8 billion, according to Caplight. Founded in 2011, the firm develops customer support software, but launched a new product in 2023 named Fin, an AI agent for businesses that automatically responds to customers’ inquiries via text. Fin seems to be growing faster than Intercom’s older business of selling software for customer support. CEO Eoghan McCabe announced in March that the company had passed $400 million in ARR and that the Fin agent was closing in on $100 million ARR, up 350% from the previous year. The company generated more than $300 million in annual recurring revenue at the end of 2024 but the Fin service accounted for a small portion of that total, The Information reported last year. (The story has been updated with Fin’s valuation based on Caplight.)
|
|
|
|
| |
