Recaps

This RAISE Summit 2026 panel is about who pays for AI infrastructure. IREN and Crusoe build data centres. Modular makes software that runs across different chips. Ornn is building a market for GPU capacity. Alva Energy upgrades existing nuclear plants to produce more power. AI infrastructure costs billions upfront. The panel explains what makes lenders say yes: customers who commit to buy, hardware that can be reused, and enough power to keep the machines running.

• AI Infrastructure, Compute, Chips, And Energy
• Capital, Markets, And Business Models

Matt Murphy came to Menlo Ventures in 2015 after 15 years at Kleiner Perkins. There, he was a Google board observer from the firm's initial investment through the IPO, launched the $200 million Apple-backed iFund, sourced DocuSign, and led investments including AppDynamics, which Cisco acquired for $3.7 billion, and Shazam, which Apple acquired. That history matters here: Murphy's career has repeatedly put him at the point where a new computing platform creates both an infrastructure layer and a new class of applications. Menlo's current $3 billion platform formalizes the approach: Menlo Ventures XVII invests from seed through Series A, while Menlo Inflection IV supplies growth capital from Series B onward. Anthropic became the anchor for the strategy. Murphy led Menlo's first investment in 2023, when Anthropic was pre-product and pre-revenue; Menlo later led its Series D with the largest check in the firm's history and says it has invested in every subsequent round. Menlo says its conviction came from the technical depth of Dario Amodei's team, room for another independent foundation-model company, and the view into infrastructure and applications created by proximity to the model layer. The other major investments discussed by Harry Stebbings fit that map. Menlo led OpenRouter's $40 million Series A because developers need one place to trade off model performance, price, latency, and provider capacity; co-led Lovable's $330 million Series B on the thesis that natural language expands who can create software; and joined Legora's $550 million Series D because high-context, trust-dependent legal workflows leave room for a purpose-built product above foundation models.

• Capital, Markets, And Business Models
• Frontier Models And Capabilities
• Open Models

In a Noahpinion essay, Noah Smith asks why rapidly improving AI has not yet produced an economic singularity. He examines possible limits to intelligence, then describes three computer-native sources of productivity: replicable machine cognition, captured tacit knowledge, and “cloud laws.”

• AI For Science
• Jobs, GDP, And Economic Growth
• World Models And Robotics

CNBC reporters Ashley Capoot and Kate Rooney describe Nvidia and OpenAI's talks over a proposed financing backstop for a 10-gigawatt data-center campus in Ohio. The article covers the debt Nvidia may support, the scale of the campus, and the companies already financing OpenAI's infrastructure.

• AI Infrastructure, Compute, Chips, And Energy
• Capital, Markets, And Business Models

Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI), the research lab Ilya Sutskever founded in 2024 to pursue safe superintelligence, announced a long-term partnership with NVIDIA on July 27, 2026. NVIDIA is investing in SSI and giving it access to Vera Rubin systems. SSI says this will increase its compute tenfold over 12 months. The lab says its research is ready to scale but has not disclosed the research.

• AI Infrastructure, Compute, Chips, And Energy
• Capital, Markets, And Business Models
• Frontier Models And Capabilities

This is a SemiAnalysis Weekly panel with Jordan Nanos, Dan Nishball, Zane Fong, and Kang Wen Cheang about financing AI infrastructure. It covers the capital–offtake–data-center trinity, NVIDIA’s GPU debt backstops, neocloud lending, and the token economics beneath the buildout.

• AI Infrastructure, Compute, Chips, And Energy
• Capital, Markets, And Business Models

This is Ti Morse’s July 2026 Relentless interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman about building startups and operating OpenAI. They discuss AI-era company formation, founder psychology, execution, compute, OpenAI’s evolution, product design, leadership, and durable shifts in user behavior.

• Agents
• AI Infrastructure, Compute, Chips, And Energy
• Capital, Markets, And Business Models

This is Theo Browne’s hands-on video review of Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 after a day spent pushing the model through coding, frontend, 3D, research, security, and multi-agent work. It covers why K3 feels like a frontier-class open-weight release, the architecture and economics behind it, the work it did well, and the rough interaction layer behind the “sometimes” in Theo’s title.

• Agents
• AI Infrastructure, Compute, Chips, And Energy
• Frontier Models And Capabilities
• Open Models

This 34-minute Baseten interview with Poolside co-founder Eiso Kant explains Laguna S 2.1 and Poolside's push to keep frontier model weights open. Gavin Baker's response, Jason Warner's launch post, and Poolside's release article cover the architecture, benchmarks, training system, public trajectories, and deployment.

• Agents
• AI Infrastructure, Compute, Chips, And Energy
• Frontier Models And Capabilities
• Open Models