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Issue Nº 77 COST TOTAL $14684.29 ARTICLES TODAY 6 TOKENS TOTAL 9.33B
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Market Samsung Q2 operating profit hits $58.4B on AI memory boom—third consecutive record Breaking eSIM evolves from connectivity to device trust; industrial IoT and automotive driving adoption at scale Market Morgan Stanley issues 'sell chips' as Samsung, SK Hynix tumble despite record Q2 earnings Funding Proxima Fusion closes €411M Series C led by Google, RWE at €2.4B valuation Research Claude Fable 5 writes KernelBench-Mega's first genuine megakernel at 18.7x PyTorch speedup Chips Anthropic pursues custom AI chip with Samsung to reduce NVIDIA reliance Funding Together AI closes $800M Series C led by Aramco at $6.5B valuation on $1.15B ARR Chips NVIDIA, Hugging Face integrate Isaac GR00T and Cosmos 3 into open LeRobot library Funding Google backs Proxima Fusion €411m raise for stellarator nuclear fusion reactors Market SK Hynix launches $29B U.S. listing; Samsung Q2 operating profit surges 19x YoY Funding IQM Quantum goes public on Nasdaq at $1.9B, Europe's first quantum IPO Funding Cleantech funding hits $8B in Q2 2026, highest in two years; Stegra green steel leads with $1.6B Chips CXMT DDR5 memory hits 8,200 MT/s on MSI AM5 boards; Chinese chip makers accelerate speed validation Market Samsung -9%, SK Hynix -14.6% trigger Kospi circuit breaker; memory giants lose $290B as AI capex doubts spread Market Chinese AI models claim 30%+ of U.S. token traffic; Z.ai's GLM-5.2 rivals Anthropic on cost and code Funding IQM, first European quantum firm on Nasdaq, debuts at $1.9B valuation amid dealer skepticism Funding Hive raises $15M for autonomous industrial 'silicon brain' claiming 80% cost reduction Chips Fab2 rebrands Atomic Semi, pivots to mass-producing semiconductor mini-fabs from Texas Market Microsoft launches Frontier Company, $2.5B bet to embed 6,000 engineers inside enterprise AI deployments Funding MGX closes $49B AI fund, world's largest dedicated AI investment vehicle Market Samsung Q2 operating profit hits $58.4B on AI memory boom—third consecutive record Breaking eSIM evolves from connectivity to device trust; industrial IoT and automotive driving adoption at scale Market Morgan Stanley issues 'sell chips' as Samsung, SK Hynix tumble despite record Q2 earnings Funding Proxima Fusion closes €411M Series C led by Google, RWE at €2.4B valuation Research Claude Fable 5 writes KernelBench-Mega's first genuine megakernel at 18.7x PyTorch speedup Chips Anthropic pursues custom AI chip with Samsung to reduce NVIDIA reliance Funding Together AI closes $800M Series C led by Aramco at $6.5B valuation on $1.15B ARR Chips NVIDIA, Hugging Face integrate Isaac GR00T and Cosmos 3 into open LeRobot library Funding Google backs Proxima Fusion €411m raise for stellarator nuclear fusion reactors Market SK Hynix launches $29B U.S. listing; Samsung Q2 operating profit surges 19x YoY Funding IQM Quantum goes public on Nasdaq at $1.9B, Europe's first quantum IPO Funding Cleantech funding hits $8B in Q2 2026, highest in two years; Stegra green steel leads with $1.6B Chips CXMT DDR5 memory hits 8,200 MT/s on MSI AM5 boards; Chinese chip makers accelerate speed validation Market Samsung -9%, SK Hynix -14.6% trigger Kospi circuit breaker; memory giants lose $290B as AI capex doubts spread Market Chinese AI models claim 30%+ of U.S. token traffic; Z.ai's GLM-5.2 rivals Anthropic on cost and code Funding IQM, first European quantum firm on Nasdaq, debuts at $1.9B valuation amid dealer skepticism Funding Hive raises $15M for autonomous industrial 'silicon brain' claiming 80% cost reduction Chips Fab2 rebrands Atomic Semi, pivots to mass-producing semiconductor mini-fabs from Texas Market Microsoft launches Frontier Company, $2.5B bet to embed 6,000 engineers inside enterprise AI deployments Funding MGX closes $49B AI fund, world's largest dedicated AI investment vehicle
Funding

Together AI closes $800M Series C led by Aramco at $6.5B valuation on $1.15B ARR

Together AI, an AI infrastructure company providing low-cost inference for open-source and proprietary models, closed an $800m Series C led by Aramco Ventures on July 1, 2026. The funding values Together AI at $6.5bn post-money and caps a competitive funding window: Groq announced a $650m raise the prior week (June 22), giving both companies similar balance sheets and overlapping market positions as dedicated AI inference platforms targeting enterprise developers seeking alternatives to hyperscaler pricing.

Together AI disclosed that annual bookings crossed $1.15bn in Q2 2026, marking exceptional revenue traction for a two-year-old infrastructure company. The company plans to deploy the new capital toward scaling its public cloud inference capacity by a factor of 50 over five years. Aramco's participation signals strategic interest in stable, power-constrained compute supply: the Saudi state oil company's venture arm has been systematically backing AI infrastructure companies whose margin and capacity economics depend on reliable, large-scale power availability—a core competency Aramco possesses.

Together AI competes in a narrowing market segment: both Groq and Together AI pitch dedicated AI inference with lower per-token costs than cloud hyperscalers, both target the same developer base, and both aim to undercut OpenAI API and Anthropic pricing. The announcement timeline (Groq June 22, Together July 1, nine days apart) suggests both companies closed their rounds within the same fundraising cycle, which will accelerate the timeline for customer consolidation and competitive separation.

For enterprise infrastructure teams, Together AI's $1.15bn ARR and public commitment to 50x capacity growth signal that inference cost arbitrage is now a material expense category for teams running production AI workloads. The company’s ability to raise $800m post-close on strong ARR growth suggests investors believe dedicated inference platforms can capture margin from hyperscalers by servicing developers who optimize for cost over full-stack lock-in. Groq and Together AI now occupy the same market position; one will consolidate the other’s customers or the category will commoditize around price.

Sources

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