DX Today AI Daily Brief - Tuesday, August 18, 2026

DX Today AI Daily Brief - Tuesday, August 18, 2026Nvidia agrees to guarantee as much as 105 billion dollars in financing behind a massive Ohio data center that OpenAI will lease for twenty years, while Anthropic tells investors its annualized revenue run rate has climbed past 65 billion dollars ahead of a planned public offering. Groq raises 350 million at a 3.5 billion dollar valuation as it completes its pivot from chipmaking to an inference neocloud, Higgsfield closes a 400 million dollar Series B at 5.4 billion with Goldman Sachs and Intel backing, and voice startup Wispr raises 280 million at a 2 billion dollar valuation while launching a new in house speech model. SoftBank puts 200 million into Swiss construction robotics firm Gravis Robotics in the largest Series A the sector has seen, defense startup Smack Technologies raises 61 million as Pentagon pressure accelerates military AI adoption, and Cursor launches Origin, a code hosting platform taking direct aim at GitHub. Fortinet acquires runtime security startup Virtue AI, Razorpay unveils Vulcan, India's first transformer based payments foundation model built with Nvidia and AWS, Baidu misses second quarter estimates as search advertising erodes, and Pony AI posts a 691 percent surge in robotaxi revenue.DX Today - Your daily AI news briefing, delivered every morning.#AINews #ArtificialIntelligence #DataCenters #AIFunding #DXToday