financing

J.P. Morgan strategist Tarek Hamid and his team have raised their forecast for total investment in artificial intelligence infrastructure by 2030 to $5.5 trillion in a recent research report, an increase of $400 billion from their prediction last November. The bank noted that in this investment race for super-scale data centers, approximately $4.1 trillion will come from debt financing, with loans covering an average of 85% of total project costs, indicating that AI capital expenditures have shifted to a debt market-centric financing model.Since last November, global bond issuance related to AI and data centers has exceeded $300 billion. The latest typical case comes from chip giant NVIDIA, which completed the pricing of a $25 billion investment-grade bond issuance this Monday, marking its return to the bond market for the first time in five years. This issuance was conducted in seven tranches (with maturities ranging from 2 to 30 years) and attracted oversubscription of up to $85 billion, ultimately increasing the issuance size by 25% from the initial target.The research report emphasizes that although tech giants like NVIDIA, Alphabet, and Amazon are generating substantial cash flow from the AI boom (with NVIDIA estimating free cash flow exceeding $200 billion this fiscal year), these giants still choose to issue hundreds of billions of dollars in bonds. This indicates that such bond issuance is not due to a "lack of financing," but rather that the credit market is confirming the pricing of AI assets.

According to The Information, DeepSeek has completed a record financing of over $7 billion, valuing the company at over $50 billion in this round of financing.In terms of funding sources, founder Liang Wenfeng personally invested 20 billion yuan, Tencent invested 10 billion yuan, CATL invested 5 billion yuan, and JD.com, NetEase, and IDG Capital each invested 3 billion yuan. The only exception is the National Artificial Intelligence Industry Investment Fund of China, which directly invested 1 billion yuan in DeepSeek, not only holding voting rights but also not subject to a 5-year lock-up period. Aside from the national-level fund, external investors have no voting rights and can only access specific financial information and enjoy priority investment rights in subsequent financing.The new round of financing marks a significant shift in DeepSeek's operating model. Since its establishment in 2023, DeepSeek, as the AI team under Huansquare Quantitative, has relied on its own funds for operation and has maintained research independence due to a lack of commercialization pressure. However, under pressure from funding and talent retention, Liang Wenfeng and the team initiated financing in April and conducted strict due diligence on the limited partners behind the investors to prevent equity from falling into the hands of unknown investors.

Green energy infrastructure startup TAR announced the completion of a $27 million seed round financing to develop modular "plug-and-play" power systems for data centers, aimed at addressing the power and deployment bottlenecks faced by data centers in the AI era.According to reports, the solution combines solar energy, wind energy, battery storage, and natural gas backup units to achieve nearly round-the-clock (24/7) local power supply capability, reducing reliance on the public grid and thus bypassing issues such as grid access queuing, approval delays, and power price fluctuations. TAR's co-founder stated that the core idea is to significantly compress the deployment cycle of energy systems through factory prefabrication, pre-assembly, and pre-testing, enabling data centers to achieve "rapid go-live" capability.In pilot projects, the system can provide approximately 10 MW of stable power supply and plans to deploy over 200 MW of normal load capacity by 2027. The company noted that its first customer is an undisclosed "neocloud" service provider, aiming to provide a faster energy deployment path for AI computing infrastructure.In terms of the economic model, TAR stated that its solution does not aim for costs below those of traditional grids but prioritizes solving the "speed issue." Its off-grid energy system can be deployed in about three months, avoiding the time costs associated with grid access and land restrictions. As the demand for AI computing continues to grow, power supply has been identified by multiple studies as one of the main bottlenecks for data center expansion. Industry analysis suggests that the "off-grid energy + modular data center" model is becoming a new direction in the competition for AI infrastructure.

According to a report by The Information, Broadcom announced its support for the Anthropic computing power project participated by Apollo and Blackstone.On the surface, this deal appears to be a financing arrangement for AI computing infrastructure, but industry insiders believe that its core lies in indirectly driving the long-term demand growth for Broadcom's custom AI chips by promoting large-scale AI computing deployments.

According to The Block, the Latin American cross-border payment app El Dorado has completed a $9 million Series A funding round, led by Paradigm, with participation from Coinbase Ventures and Verda Ventures.El Dorado focuses on addressing the issues of low efficiency and high costs in cross-border payments in Latin America, covering 12 countries including Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia. It currently has over 100,000 active users and has processed more than 5 million transactions.The company stated that its business has expanded to enterprise-level payment services, supporting cross-border trade and corporate cash flow, and has integrated stablecoin and fiat settlement systems into a unified payment architecture.After this funding round, El Dorado further launched an enterprise payment product based on the Tempo Layer 1 blockchain. This network was co-incubated by Paradigm and Stripe, aiming to provide global enterprises with cross-border settlement capabilities without the need for local entities.Analysts believe that as stablecoins and on-chain payment infrastructure accelerate their implementation in emerging markets, Latin American cross-border payments are becoming one of the important testing grounds for the integration of crypto finance and traditional payment systems.

According to PR Newswire, the digital payment platform Interchecks announced the completion of a $50 million Series C financing round, led by Bettor Capital, with participation from Commerce Ventures, Decades Holdings, and Thayer Street Partners.The company primarily serves account transfers, digital banking (neobank), brokerage platforms, and cryptocurrency wallet deposit scenarios, allowing businesses to make real-time deposits to compliant accounts using debit card vouchers, and achieving fast and secure fund flows through an integrated risk control system. It currently maintains partnerships with global payment networks such as Visa and Mastercard.

According to The Information, data center software startup and AI server broker Hydra Host has completed a new round of financing of $100 million, with a valuation of approximately $800 million. This round was led by Kindred Ventures, with participation from NVIDIA, ARK Invest under Cathie Wood, early CoreWeave investor Magnetar, and existing shareholders Founders Fund and Flume Ventures.Hydra Host was founded in 2021, initially serving cryptocurrency miners, and has now transformed into a data center operator providing automation software, as well as undertaking AI server trading matchmaking business. NVIDIA's direct involvement further highlights its strategic intent to build an ecological landscape in the AI computing power market.

According to Bloomberg, citing informed sources, the operating entity of Xiaohongshu, Xiaohongshu Technology Co., Ltd., is preparing to secretly submit its initial public offering application in Hong Kong by the end of June. The report states that the company is advancing potential listing matters with advisors, and this transaction is expected to rank among the large IPOs in Hong Kong in recent years. However, details such as the listing time, fundraising scale, and valuation have not yet been finalized, and discussions are still ongoing.Xiaohongshu was founded in Shanghai in 2013, with investors including Tencent, Alibaba, Sequoia China, Hillhouse Capital, and GGV Capital. In the 2024 financing round, Xiaohongshu's valuation was approximately $17 billion. With business growth, Xiaohongshu's valuation soared to $31 billion in secondary market trading in September 2025, and it predicted to shareholders that the full-year profit for 2025 would reach approximately $3 billion.

According to market news, the French company Mistral AI is in talks for financing, with a valuation of approximately 20 billion euros.

According to Reuters, Anthropic has signed more than 12 preliminary leasing agreements for data centers in the United States, with a total capacity exceeding 1 gigawatt. It is reported that Anthropic executives are discussing with Google about providing financial guarantees for these lease payments, while Apollo Global Management and Blackstone are providing private credit as part of a broader financing structure.Google's Gemini directly competes with Anthropic's Claude, but Google has committed up to $40 billion in investment to Anthropic and is participating in joint server chip design. Last month, Anthropic completed a $65 billion financing round with a valuation of $965 billion, surpassing OpenAI to become the AI company with the highest implied market value, and has secretly submitted a U.S. IPO application.Previously, Anthropic mainly relied on cloud service providers like Google Cloud for computing power, and building its own data centers aims to reduce dependence on competitors. In addition, Anthropic pays SpaceX (also a competitor through xAI) $1.25 billion per month for computing power. Neither Google nor Anthropic has publicly responded to specific details.

The AI-native trading decision platform TradingRazor announced the completion of a $1.5 million seed round financing, led by OneBit Ventures, Gaea Ventures, and Blockin VC, with participation from a group of angel investors in the Web3 industry. The new funds will be used for product development and ecosystem growth to support on-chain capital flow tracking, market data aggregation, AI-driven trading modeling, and embedded risk management.

According to GeekWire, AI startup Prometheus, co-founded by Jeff Bezos, has completed a $12 billion Series B funding round, with a valuation of approximately $41 billion. Investors include JPMorgan Chase, BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, DST Global, and Arch Venture Partners.Prometheus has dropped "Project" from its original name and is dedicated to creating what Bezos calls "general artificial intelligence engineers," using AI tools to accelerate the physical product development process from design to manufacturing. Prometheus co-CEO Vik Bajaj stated that over the past few years, they have been able to transform complex issues from design to manufacturing into end-to-end AI problems. Bezos revealed that the company may acquire some manufacturing businesses that could benefit from its technology and help improve their production processes.This marks Bezos's first CEO role since stepping down as Amazon's CEO in 2021. The company currently has about 150 employees and is headquartered in San Francisco, with teams in London and Zurich. Bezos mentioned that the product launch timeline has not yet been determined, but an early version is set to be released soon.

According to The Block, Canton developer Digital Asset has completed a $355 million financing round, led by a16z crypto, with participation from subsidiaries of the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, Apollo Global Management, BNP Paribas, Bodhi, Castle Securities, CME Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Greenwulf Asset Management, Hanwha Investment & Securities, HSBC, Liberty City Ventures, Optiver, Polychain, S&P Global, SBI Group, SoFi, Tradeweb, and William Blair.The company stated that after this financing round, Digital Asset has entered a profitable state. Its CEO Yuval Rooz pointed out that the financing expansion of the balance sheet not only enhances the company's financial flexibility but also allows it to more freely pursue mergers and acquisitions, engage in emerging projects, and assist partners in building on-chain financial business systems.

According to Aastocks, Futu Securities has officially announced the approval of its service upgrade for license No. 1 (Securities Trading) by the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission, launching virtual asset trading financing services for eligible clients in Hong Kong. It is understood that the collateral for this service must be traditional securities, and the credit limit obtained by clients through traditional securities financing cannot be used for cryptocurrency trading, which is currently relaxed to be usable for cryptocurrency trading.As for using virtual assets directly as collateral for "margin trading," although the circular issued by the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission in February relaxed the use of virtual assets as collateral, it also mentioned that before the revision of capital regulations, virtual asset collateral will be subject to a 100% deduction according to the Securities and Futures (Financial Resources) Rules, which is expected to pose certain challenges to the industry's capital efficiency in actual operations.

AIPayWithCrypto announced that it has officially completed its first round of strategic financing of $10,000,000, led by Animoca Brands, with participation from Titans Ventures, Castrum Capital, Adaverse, M2M Capital, and other institutions.It is reported that in addition to the capital injection, all parties have also reached a deep strategic consensus to jointly build the future of AI and payment integration, as well as to improve infrastructure to serve global users and AI economic entities. The APC platform will present a new AI + payment system to the market, solidifying the core competitiveness of the payment sector.

According to official news, the decentralized futures exchange MNX, aimed at the AI economy, has completed a $6.4 million financing round, with participation from Village Global, Cambrian, Relay Digital, North Island Ventures, and others.MNX aims to build AI-native derivatives infrastructure, covering GPU leasing prices, data center electricity cost futures, valuation markets for private labs such as OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, AI benchmarks and financial forecasting markets, as well as global stock perpetual contracts related to AI. The platform supports leverage, portfolio margin, and batch auction fair execution, with settlement conducted in a completely non-custodial manner on MegaETH, and the mainnet is scheduled to officially launch this summer.