Morning Briefing

- NVIDIA teamed with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR to launch financing platforms that could direct over $500 billion of third‑party capital into AI compute infrastructure. - Etched raised $700 million in growth equity to build custom inference silicon and rack‑scale clusters for frontier AI workloads. - Optical‑interconnect firms such as Quintessent, Shanghai Xin‑Guang‑Jie Intelligent Tech and Ruilian Zhisu announced seed or Series‑A rounds of $25‑40 million to develop silicon‑photonics networking for AI data centers. - Early‑stage companies like Emerald AI and ONiO secured seed funding to create ultra‑low‑power AI compute and microcontroller chips aimed at energy‑constrained applications.