Infrastructure

IBM Shares Crash 25% — Worst Day on Record — as Clients Shift Spend to AI Infrastructure

IBM shares plummeted 25% on July 14 after preliminary Q2 results fell short of expectations, the company's worst trading day on record (surpassing its prior worst day, October 19, 1987). CEO Arvind Krishna told investors that in late June, clients shifted quarterly capex toward servers, storage, and memory purchases to secure supply-constrained AI infrastructure ahead of expected price increases, causing large software and consulting deals to slip. IBM guided to Q2 revenue of $17.2B and adjusted EPS of $2.93, both below consensus.

Monzo Co-Founder Tom Blomfield Takes Leave From Y Combinator to Join Anthropic

Tom Blomfield — co-founder of Monzo and GoCardless, and a Y Combinator general partner since 2023 — announced on July 13 that he is taking a leave of absence from YC to join Anthropic's compute team under co-founder Tom Brown. He said that as the industry enters the early stages of recursive self-improvement, compute availability is becoming one of the most important problems to solve, extending Anthropic's 2026 hiring run that already brought in Andrej Karpathy and DeepMind's John Jumper.

Apple Sues OpenAI and Two Former Employees Over Alleged Hardware Trade-Secret Theft

Apple filed suit in Northern California federal court on July 10-11 against OpenAI and two former Apple employees, alleging a coordinated scheme to steal hardware trade secrets tied to OpenAI's io Products consumer-hardware venture (co-founded by former Apple design chief Jony Ive). The complaint alleges OpenAI's hardware chief Tang Tan — a former Apple VP — coached departing Apple staff on evading security processes, and that job candidates were told to bring 'actual parts' from Apple to interviews; Apple says over 400 former employees now work at OpenAI. OpenAI says it has 'no interest in other companies' trade secrets.'

Nvidia Partners With AI Clouds on Revenue-Sharing 'AI Factory' Deployments

Nvidia announced a program on July 3 to deploy large-scale, multi-tenant AI factories with partner AI clouds under a revenue-sharing and credit-support model, lowering the upfront capital burden on smaller providers. The structure shifts Nvidia from pure hardware vendor toward a participant in its customers' inference economics.

Together AI Raises $800M Series C Led by Aramco Ventures at $8.3B Valuation

Together AI announced an $800 million Series C on July 1, led by Aramco Ventures at an $8.3 billion post-money valuation, with participation from Nvidia, Vista Equity Partners, and General Catalyst. The open-source-focused inference cloud said annual bookings crossed $1.15 billion in the second quarter.

Meta Reportedly Building 'Meta Compute' to Sell Surplus AI Capacity

Reports on July 1 said Meta is developing an internal cloud unit called Meta Compute to sell surplus AI training and inference capacity — along with access to its Llama model family — to enterprise customers. The move would turn Meta's massive data-center buildout from a pure cost center into a revenue line competing with established AI clouds.