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Chips Imec roadmap: 2.5D optical I/O cuts AI inference interconnect power from 1.25kW to <200W Breaking SpaceXAI releases Grok 4.5 at $2/$6 per MTok; claims parity with Opus 4.7, faster Breaking Grok 4.5 launches at $2/$6 per million tokens: SpaceXAI's economics play vs. Opus, not performance crown Funding Rapidus secures ¥267.6B ($1.7B) for 2nm mass production by 2027; Japan largest shareholder Market SK Hynix US IPO (SKHY) launches July 10; $28B raise 7x oversubscribed, AI memory demand drives 200%+ YTD gain Funding QuantumDiamonds closes €91M (€15M equity + €76M grants) for quantum chip-inspection tech Chips Micron breaks ground on $9.3B HBM fab in Japan; adds subsidized capacity for AI Market Luxshare IPO debuts in Hong Kong, raises HK$24.27B; Apple supplier eyes broader electronics and auto market Funding Prime Intellect hits $1B valuation on $130M Series A; $100M ARR; enterprise RL agents move off-frontier Funding ElevenLabs targets $22B secondary valuation; voice AI doubles from $11B in five months on $500M ARR Breaking SpaceXAI launches Grok 4.5 at Opus-class performance; $2/M input tokens vs Claude $5/M Market Blackstone QTS raises $870M via data center asset-backed securities; Nemotron benchmarks open vs closed models Breaking China flags Claude Code monitoring mechanism as security backdoor; Anthropic says it's anti-abuse experiment Funding Bespoke Labs raises $40M for AI agent training environments; frontier labs abandon pure model scaling Chips NVIDIA denies Kyber NVL144 delay reports; roadmap remains intact for H2 2027 launch Funding Taktile raises $110M Series C from Goldman Sachs for AI decisioning in banks and insurers Funding Bespoke Labs raises $40M Series A to build realistic training grounds for long-horizon AI agents Market SpaceX stock slides to $148 post-Nasdaq 100 inclusion; analysts see AI data center, Starlink upside Market Together AI launches Provisioned Throughput for reserved open-model inference at 90% below closed APIs Market Meta breaks ground on $9B Alberta data center; first Canadian AI facility Chips Imec roadmap: 2.5D optical I/O cuts AI inference interconnect power from 1.25kW to <200W Breaking SpaceXAI releases Grok 4.5 at $2/$6 per MTok; claims parity with Opus 4.7, faster Breaking Grok 4.5 launches at $2/$6 per million tokens: SpaceXAI's economics play vs. Opus, not performance crown Funding Rapidus secures ¥267.6B ($1.7B) for 2nm mass production by 2027; Japan largest shareholder Market SK Hynix US IPO (SKHY) launches July 10; $28B raise 7x oversubscribed, AI memory demand drives 200%+ YTD gain Funding QuantumDiamonds closes €91M (€15M equity + €76M grants) for quantum chip-inspection tech Chips Micron breaks ground on $9.3B HBM fab in Japan; adds subsidized capacity for AI Market Luxshare IPO debuts in Hong Kong, raises HK$24.27B; Apple supplier eyes broader electronics and auto market Funding Prime Intellect hits $1B valuation on $130M Series A; $100M ARR; enterprise RL agents move off-frontier Funding ElevenLabs targets $22B secondary valuation; voice AI doubles from $11B in five months on $500M ARR Breaking SpaceXAI launches Grok 4.5 at Opus-class performance; $2/M input tokens vs Claude $5/M Market Blackstone QTS raises $870M via data center asset-backed securities; Nemotron benchmarks open vs closed models Breaking China flags Claude Code monitoring mechanism as security backdoor; Anthropic says it's anti-abuse experiment Funding Bespoke Labs raises $40M for AI agent training environments; frontier labs abandon pure model scaling Chips NVIDIA denies Kyber NVL144 delay reports; roadmap remains intact for H2 2027 launch Funding Taktile raises $110M Series C from Goldman Sachs for AI decisioning in banks and insurers Funding Bespoke Labs raises $40M Series A to build realistic training grounds for long-horizon AI agents Market SpaceX stock slides to $148 post-Nasdaq 100 inclusion; analysts see AI data center, Starlink upside Market Together AI launches Provisioned Throughput for reserved open-model inference at 90% below closed APIs Market Meta breaks ground on $9B Alberta data center; first Canadian AI facility
Breaking

SpaceXAI releases Grok 4.5 at $2/$6 per MTok; claims parity with Opus 4.7, faster

SpaceXAI released Grok 4.5 on July 8, 2026, positioned as an Opus-class model built on xAI's new 1.5-trillion-parameter V9 foundation. Elon Musk claimed internal assessments show it is roughly comparable to Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.7 "but much faster." The model was trained on tens of thousands of NVIDIA GB300 GPUs at Colossus (SpaceX's Memphis supercomputer cluster) with supplemental coding data from Cursor, which SpaceX agreed to acquire for $60 billion in June 2026.

Grok 4.5 is priced at $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens—roughly 60% cheaper per input token than Claude Opus 4.8 ($5 input, $25 output) and GPT-5.6 Sol ($5 input, $30 output), both also released Thursday. Independent benchmarks show mixed results: Grok 4.5 scored 64.7% on SWE Bench Pro (a software engineering task resolver), beating GPT-5.5's 58.6% but trailing Opus 4.8 (69.2%) and Claude Fable 5 (80.4%). Musk's claim of Opus parity rests on SpaceX's internal evaluations, not public benchmarks.

For teams running high-volume coding workloads, the cost-performance tradeoff favors Grok 4.5; for frontier performance, Fable 5 leads. The release is SpaceXAI's first major product under the merged SpaceX-xAI organization (closed February 2026) and first visible fruit of the Cursor integration. Musk signaled an aggressive cadence: one new foundation model every month through end of 2026. EU access is blocked at launch, rolling out mid-July. Developers should validate performance claims on their workloads before migrating high-stakes tasks.

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