financing

According to Bloomberg, informed sources revealed that JPMorgan Chase has begun preliminary discussions with potential lenders to seek a $5 billion debt financing plan to support Volta Infra Holdings Ltd. in building artificial intelligence data centers.Volta AI completed a $300 million venture capital financing earlier this month, with a valuation of $2.4 billion, aiming to help more tech companies access the costly resources of artificial intelligence chips.

According to official news, the anonymous Q&A game Chomp has completed a $3.6 million financing round, led jointly by Jsquare and Blueyard, with participation from VCs such as Accomplice, Big Brain Holdings, No Limit Holdings, Reverie, and Caballeros.Chomp is a social game based on anonymous Q&A and prediction mechanisms, allowing users to answer questions and predict others' answers, uncovering the public's true thoughts and their own biases in understanding others. In addition to consumer products, Chomp also applies these anonymous, well-labeled opinion data to scenarios such as AI model training and consumer research.The company believes that this type of data can capture subjective opinions that are difficult to obtain from the public internet and provide high-context data for AI models. Founder and CEO Kiko previously served as COO of Orca, a decentralized trading platform in the Solana ecosystem.

According to CoinDesk, the U.S. clearing and custody institution RQD Clearing announced the completion of a $74 million financing round, led by Bain Capital Tech Opportunities, a technology investment division of Bain Capital, with participation from ABN AMRO Clearing Bank and Nyca Partners. This round of financing will be used to expand operations in North America, Asia, and the Middle East, and to enhance infrastructure development for digital asset custody and asset tokenization.RQD primarily provides post-trade clearing and custody services for broker-dealers, investment advisors, and overseas financial institutions in the U.S. market, responsible for key processes such as securities and funds settlement, and risk management. This year, the company has processed approximately 515 million stock trades, involving nearly $2 trillion, accounting for about 2.4% of the National Market System (NMS) stock trading volume in the U.S.As Wall Street institutions accelerate their exploration of on-chain finance, traditional market infrastructure is becoming an important direction for the competition of tokenized assets. RQD has previously collaborated with Blue Ocean Technologies to advance the clearing and settlement infrastructure for tokenized U.S. stocks and has aligned with the tokenized securities framework of the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC).

The Block reported that Hyperliquid Strategies raised $647 million in equity capital and more than doubled its Hyperliquid native token treasury to 29.3 million HYPE, valued at approximately $1.9 billion at the end of the fiscal year, while maintaining $149.9 million in cash and no debt.The company stated that it has since deployed $773.4 million to acquire approximately 16.5 million additional HYPE at an average cost of $46.77, and spent $27.8 million to repurchase PURR shares, with $132.6 million in cash remaining as of August 19.

Cryptocurrency financial and tax solutions provider FinTax announced the completion of its seed round financing, led by YZi Labs, with participation from Amber, Hash House, Pundi AI, Waverider International, and Nexus Holdings, resulting in a post-investment valuation of $40 million. Previous round investors include Victory Courage, BGIN, Tools Factory, and individual investor Fan Chao.In recent years, YZi Labs has been continuously investing in stablecoins, RWA, payment, and institutional-level digital asset infrastructure. Leveraging FinTax's expertise in on-chain data processing, crypto accounting, cross-jurisdictional tax practices, and crypto asset financial auditing, both parties will explore long-term ecological collaboration around institutional-level financial and tax infrastructure, compliance standards, and emerging scenarios such as stablecoins, RWA, and payments.Following this round of financing, FinTax will accelerate the scaling of its five product lines, expanding its business from the Asia-Pacific and North American markets to Europe and the Middle East, and deepening the application of AI in complex financial and tax scenarios. FinTax will continue to promote the dual iteration of blockchain and legal systems across dozens of jurisdictions, enabling on-chain economic activities to connect with the real-world financial and tax systems.

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang defended the company's increasingly expanding role in financing the AI ecosystem on CNBC's "Mad Money," calling the investment in cutting-edge labs a "once-in-a-generation" opportunity and stating that the risks are relatively low. He pointed out that the outside world overlooks a key point: these are the first batch of startups that require hundreds of billions of dollars in funding, with a very high capital intensity for building and deploying AI. NVIDIA has invested in model companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, as well as new cloud service providers, and has provided financial support for data center projects, including $105 billion in support for a large computing power park in Ohio (with OpenAI as a tenant), and has collaborated with Wall Street institutions to arrange up to $500 billion in data center financing.In response to criticisms of "circular financing" and comparisons to similar internet bubbles, Huang stated that NVIDIA hopes to become an equity investor in cutting-edge AI labs and provide broader support, as these companies do not yet have investment-grade qualifications and low-cost financing records. He emphasized that the invested capital will yield substantial returns and that the risks are low because the computing infrastructure can be redeployed to other clients and workloads when the supported companies encounter difficulties. NVIDIA just announced better-than-expected results for the second quarter of fiscal year 2027: revenue of $96.2 billion, more than doubling year-on-year; data center revenue increased by 117% to $89 billion, and it is expected that revenue will grow by about 70% in fiscal year 2028. Following the announcement, the stock price rose about 4% in after-hours trading.

AI assistant startup Instinct announced the completion of a $250 million Series B financing round, co-led by Index Ventures and Benchmark. After this round of financing, the company's total funding amount reached $350 million, with a valuation rising to $2.5 billion.Instinct was launched by Spear Street Technology, led by 23-year-old founder Noah Shinn. The product is still in private testing. Users can connect it to personal applications and devices, and interact with the AI assistant via text messages and phone calls for planning trips, purchasing goods, booking events, and managing subscriptions among other daily tasks.

The Sui development team co-founder of Mysten Labs, Kostas Kryptos, stated that Havenex is undergoing Series A financing and is about to complete it. All necessary license applications and some additional license applications have been submitted, and the financing amount is also close to being fully allocated.Havenex is not positioned to become another Coinbase, Binance, Bybit, or Kraken, but rather to provide infrastructure for financial institutions, enabling them to offer digital assets and traditional financial assets to clients while meeting regulatory, custody, security, and transparency requirements. Havenex plans to support a multi-chain architecture, verifiable custody, continuous solvency proof, default multi-signature, quantum-resistant keys, hardware two-factor authentication wallets, as well as self-custody and key loss protection mechanisms; in regions where regulations allow, it will also support privacy assets and RWA. The project will use Sui technology in suitable scenarios while integrating assets, bridging protocols, and foundational components from other ecosystems.The concept of Havenex was proposed by him, and he will currently participate as an advisor, but Mysten Labs and Sui remain his main focus. He stated that the project aims to establish transparency and security standards different from those of FTX and Mt. Gox, and to reduce the serious vulnerability risks caused by code generated by large language models recently.

In August, Nvidia signed a memorandum of understanding with major capital providers, planning to establish an independent financing platform to raise over $500 billion in third-party capital.

According to Techcrunch, AI Agent testing infrastructure startup Arga Labs announced the completion of a $10 million seed round financing, led by General Catalyst, with participation from institutions such as BoxGroup, Emergence Capital, Gradient Ventures, and SV Angel.The company aims to address the challenges of testing, training, and adapting complex business systems during the deployment of enterprise-level AI Agents by creating a complete digital twin environment for enterprise software, replicating permission systems, Webhooks, and system interaction logic, allowing AI Agents to train in an environment close to real work.

According to TechCrunch, AI Agent development company Runable has completed a $21 million Series A funding round, led jointly by usquehanna Venture Capital and Nexus Venture Partners, with participation from Together Fund and Array VC.The AI Agent currently being developed by the company is capable of generating websites, applications, and presentations through natural language, and can also handle foundational tasks such as deployment and data analysis. The new funding will be used to optimize AI inference costs and integrate infrastructure, marketing, and distribution capabilities.

According to TechCrunch, AI-focused search infrastructure startup Keenable has completed a $26 million seed round of financing, led by Accel, with participation from Conviction Partners and several angel investors.Keenable was co-founded by Andrey Styskin, former head of search, AI, and cloud business at Yandex, and German AI scientist Matthias Petri. The company is building a web search index for AI agents, which currently includes over 10 billion documents. Its Web Search API and AI-focused Web Query Language are now live and will be free until the end of September.

NVIDIA will announce its second-quarter financial report after the U.S. stock market closes on Wednesday, with market focus mainly on five aspects: AI infrastructure financing, progress on Vera Rubin servers, open model layout, sales in China, and gross margin pressure. NVIDIA recently announced a large-scale AI infrastructure financing plan and is supporting a major data center project in southern Ohio. Investors are beginning to pay attention to the company's depth of participation in related transactions and how these financing arrangements will ultimately yield returns.In terms of products, NVIDIA stated that the next-generation Vera Rubin servers are expected to start shipping in the third or fourth quarter of this year. Previously, Blackwell was delayed for several months due to design flaws, so whether Vera Rubin can proceed as planned will be an important observation point. Meanwhile, NVIDIA is reportedly acquiring technology and engineering talent from the open-weight AI model startup Poolside through a $6 billion authorization agreement to accelerate its own Nemotron open model development.Additionally, the market will also focus on NVIDIA's sales performance in the Chinese market. Regarding gross margins, the company currently maintains a high level of about 75%, but as memory prices rise and competition for custom chips and new processors intensifies, NVIDIA may face increasing difficulty in passing costs onto customers.

According to Chao Xiang Research, a Morgan Stanley report points out that the total off-balance-sheet commitments disclosed by hyperscale vendors, Nvidia, and Broadcom have exceeded $3.1 trillion. Among them, lease commitments amount to $1.1 trillion, procurement commitments to $1.7 trillion, and the total on-balance-sheet debt and lease liabilities of hyperscale vendors is $770 billion.Amazon and Google's free cash flow turned negative in the second quarter of 2026, and Meta is expected to follow suit next quarter. Financing tools are restructuring the capital structure of AI computing power from six aspects: off-balance-sheet lease and procurement commitments constitute the first layer of financing, the proportion of debt issuance rises from 2% in 2025 to 19% in 2026, Google frees up $110 billion by cutting buybacks and issuing equity, Oracle's customer prepayments in the second quarter amount to $4.6 billion, and Broadcom and Nvidia launched a chip leasing SPV to support unrated AI labs.Morgan Stanley believes that as the financing structure itself becomes a core variable of the AI supply chain, the importance of tracking off-balance-sheet commitments and changes in accounting judgments is approaching that of tracking chip shipments themselves.

According to The Information, DeepSeek is seeking a second round of financing with a valuation of 500 billion yuan, planning to raise 50 billion yuan. The company's revenue from January to July 2026 reached 475 million yuan, approximately 10 times the total revenue for 2025; during the same period, the net loss narrowed to 715 million yuan, compared to a net loss of 935 million yuan for the entire year of 2025. The gross margin is 44.6%, with the API business gross margin reaching 82.9%, mainly due to reduced inference costs from optimized computing infrastructure.Recently, DeepSeek raised its API pricing, with the V4-Pro peak output price increasing from $0.87 to $3.96, but still far below Kimi K3's $15 and Claude Opus 5's $25. The company's investment in computing infrastructure surged from 1.2 billion yuan in 2025 to 11 billion yuan from January to July 2026, primarily for server leasing and AI chip procurement. DeepSeek completed its first round of external financing of 50 billion yuan in June, and the company has hired investment banks to prepare for an IPO in Shanghai next year.

According to official news, the on-chain structured product infrastructure City Protocol announced the completion of seed and Pre-A round financing, with a total financing amount reaching 11 million USD. Investors include Dragonfly, Jump Crypto, CMT Digital, Stratified Capital, Adaverse, Mirana, and others.City Protocol is committed to bringing structured products on-chain, providing integrated infrastructure for the issuance, operation, and acquisition of structured products through the tokenization layer, vault layer, and issuance operation layer. Its flagship product is the on-chain structured product platform Venzo, which has currently launched 4 strategy vaults with a TVL of 40 million USD, covering strategies such as quantitative hedging, cross-exchange arbitrage, and private credit, which were previously mainly aimed at institutional and professional investors. Venzo will also soon launch thematic vaults, divided into character tracking and sector themes, where a basket of underlying assets will be directly purchased and adjusted in users' wallets by the program according to public rules.

Citigroup expects that by 2026, the issuance scale of South Korean companies in the global bond and stock markets will reach a record high. Companies are raising growth funds through international investors, with SK Hynix's $26.5 billion U.S. listing being the most prominent. Jangho Park, CEO of Citigroup Global Markets Korea, stated that South Korea has an increasing number of world-class companies and emerging industry leaders, who are increasingly utilizing capital markets with competitive financing conditions to raise funds for their growth objectives.As Citigroup makes this forecast, the two major chip manufacturers in South Korea are becoming the main beneficiaries of global artificial intelligence infrastructure construction. South Korea is seeking to encourage companies, including Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, to invest at least 135 trillion won ($975 billion) in chip and data center construction, although many projects are still in the early planning stages.

Indian enterprise voice AI startup Ringg announced that it has secured a $10 million investment from Peak XV Partners, as an extension of its Series A funding; the company had previously completed a $5.5 million Series A funding earlier this year, bringing the total funding to $15.5 million.Ringg initially started with text-to-speech technology and has now shifted to providing AI agent services for enterprises, with clients including Cred, Flipkart, Practo, Groww, and PolicyBazaar. Its voice AI has been integrated into approximately 1,200 clinics of Practo for patient appointments and post-visit follow-ups.

According to a report by Reuters, AI data center power infrastructure company Emerald AI announced the completion of a $150 million Series A funding round, with the company's valuation reaching $1.05 billion. This round of financing was co-led by Energize Capital and DCVC, and to date, its total financing has exceeded $220 million.Emerald AI is committed to transforming AI data centers into flexible grid resources, addressing one of the biggest bottlenecks facing AI development, which is the power supply issue. The new funds will be used to expand global commercial deployments with AI companies, data center operators, and power companies.