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Nvidia Plans to Invest in Perplexity Valued Over $30B

Catch up on the top artificial intelligence news and commentary by Wall Street analysts on publicly traded companies in the space with this daily recap compiled by The Fly.INVESTMENT:Nvidiais in talks to invest in Perplexity at a valuation above $30B, potentially boosting the AI startup's valuation by more than 50% from its prior financing, The Information's Phoebe Liu, Valida Pau, and Amir Efrati.PRICE INCREASE:Nvidia has told some of its largest customers that prices of servers containing AI chips are going to increase over 15% in many cases as memory chip costs skyrocket, Brody Ford and Ian King of Bloomberg. The increased prices will go into effect on systems shipped early next year, people familiar with the process told Bloomberg.ALTERNATIVE TO CHINESE AI:Nvidia plans to use a $6B deal with AI startup Poolside to build open-weight AI models, one to compete with China's DeepSeek and Kimi K3, Robbie Whelan of The Wall Street Journal, citing people familiar with the matter. The company's deal with Poolside will also present a direct challenge to U.S. AI companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic.AI INFRASTRUCTURE:Nvidia announced that SpaceXAIwill deploy Nvidia Vera CPUs to accelerate its next generation of agentic AI applications, "bringing the first CPU built for AI agents to one of the world's most ambitious AI deployments." Nvidia said, "Agentic AI applications increasingly rely on CPUs to orchestrate tools, execute code, process data and run simulations between model calls. SpaceXAI will use Vera to accelerate these application workloads, helping AI agents act faster while keeping GPUs fed and fully utilized. SpaceXAI plans to expand its AI infrastructure behind Grok on Nvidia Vera Rubin, while extending an optimized Vera Rubin NVL72 into space with its first-generation Starmind satellite."Nvidia announced that Nvidia Groq 3 LPX, the interactive AI inference accelerator, is now in full production. "An extension of the Nvidia Vera Rubin platform, Groq 3 LPX delivers a major boost in AI inference by enabling ultrafast token generation for highly responsive agentic systems. Agentic systems can generate massive volumes of tokens across hundreds or thousands of inference steps, making faster token generation critical for agents to reason, act and complete complex tasks in real time. Vera Rubin NVL72 systems provide the most versatile training and inference platform for every AI factory. Nvidia Groq 3 LPX extends the inference performance of Vera Rubin NVL72 by dramatically increasing the rate of token generation, providing premium user experiences for context-heavy workloads so agents can act at extreme speeds. Nvidia Groq 3 LPX is pushing the frontier of AI inference. It delivered a record 3,400 output tokens per second in Artificial Analysis benchmarking running Gemma 4 31B, an open source agentic model, with a 100,000-token context critical for agentic systems - the fastest performance ever recorded for the model. Groq 3 LPX enables agentic tasks such as coding in minutes versus hours, providing 4x faster responsiveness for agents and latency-sensitive workloads than the nearest alternative platform," the company said.FUNDING:General Intuition, the startup building a foundation model that trains generalized AI agents to move through space and time, is in talks to raise funding at a $6B pre-money valuation from new investors including Valor Equity Partners, Point72 Ventures, and Seven Seven Six, TechCrunch's Rebecca Bellan, citing sources familiar with the matter. Existing investors including Khosla Ventures and General Catalyst are also participating in the round. The fresh funds would come just weeks after General Intuition raised $320M at a $2.3B valuation, the author notes.AI FACTORY AGREEMENT:Lancium, an energy technology and infrastructure company enabling gigawatt-scale AI factory campuses, announced a strategic collaboration with Nvidia to facilitate deployment of Nvidia technology across Lancium's growing portfolio. In addition, Nvidia has made a strategic investment in Lancium, a Blackstoneportfolio company backed by significant investments from funds managed by Blackstone Energy Transition Partners and Blackstone Multi-Asset Investing. Through this partnership, Lancium's AI factory campuses, representing 4 gigawatts of leased capacity and a development pipeline exceeding 15 gigawatts of powered land will serve as strategic deployment sites for Nvidia's total, full-stack AI factory platform, including accelerated computing, networking, and software.

Lancium Announces Strategic Collaboration with NVIDIA

Lancium, an energy technology and infrastructure company enabling gigawatt-scale AI factory campuses, announced a strategic collaboration with NVIDIA (NVDA) to facilitate deployment of NVIDIA technology across Lancium's growing portfolio. In addition, NVIDIA has made a strategic investment in Lancium, a Blackstone (BX) portfolio company backed by significant investments from funds managed by Blackstone Energy Transition Partners and Blackstone Multi-Asset Investing. Through this partnership, Lancium's AI factory campuses, representing 4 gigawatts of leased capacity and a development pipeline exceeding 15 gigawatts of powered land will serve as strategic deployment sites for NVIDIA's total, full-stack AI factory platform, including accelerated computing, networking, and software.