The line for the money gets longer
CNBC reports OpenAI is close to finalizing a funding round of up to $30 billion at a $1.25 trillion pre-money valuation, led by investors from the United Arab Emirates alongside Coatue.
· The Aigentic · Morning Brief
Good morning. The biggest names in AI are lining up for money at the same time, and the timing is the story. OpenAI is racing to close a giant private round before Anthropic opens its books to public investors, and in China, DeepSeek just raised one of the country’s largest rounds ever. Elsewhere, 1Password gives agents a safer way to log in, OpenAI goes after a fast-growing corner of the model market, and Microsoft shows how quickly an AI-driven attack can move. Here is what moved while you were away.
CNBC reports OpenAI is close to finalizing a funding round of up to $30 billion at a $1.25 trillion pre-money valuation, led by investors from the United Arab Emirates alongside Coatue. The company is positioning the money as an opportunistic bridge ahead of a possible IPO and told investors it wants signatures by the end of next week, while it also negotiates a deal for more computing capacity from the UAE. The timing is not subtle. Anthropic, which confidentially filed its own prospectus in June, is gearing up for what is widely expected to be a massive listing, reportedly at a valuation between $1.5 trillion and $2 trillion. The two labs are chasing many of the same investors, and OpenAI would rather get its checks signed before the market’s attention turns to its rival.
Bloomberg reports DeepSeek has raised about 100 billion yuan, roughly $15 billion, after lifting its target from 50 billion yuan to 80 billion and then again, making it one of the largest financing rounds in China’s history. Tencent and battery giant CATL were among the biggest investors. The company has started putting money into AI data centers and open-source models, and is reportedly working toward a listing in Shanghai. The trillion-dollar fundraising race is no longer a two-company story.
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Bloomberg also reports that SK Hyper, the data center arm of South Korea’s SK Group, is in talks with major technology companies and financial investors to fund a planned $350 billion AI infrastructure buildout. It is one more sign that the money needed to build AI is now measured on the scale of national budgets.
TechCrunch reports 1Password has launched 1Password for Agents, which lets an AI assistant sign in to your accounts without ever seeing your password. When an agent tries to log in, you get an alert and approve the request, and 1Password fills in the credentials for it. It works with agents including Claude Duet, OpenAI’s Dots and ChatGPT Work, Grok Bot and Meta’s Muse. It lands as banks report finding agents inside customer accounts that they cannot trace back to a customer’s request, so the fix for handing your password to a bot is finally arriving.
TechCrunch says OpenAI has made its Decisions API available to all customers, entering the market for fast, cheap models that pick between a set of options and report how confident they are. The category was popularized by TypeSafe’s Jev, which made the startup a $7.6 billion company. Language-tutor app Speak says the API cut the time between actions from 1.4 seconds to 0.13 seconds. Not every AI job needs a giant model, and the labs are starting to price for that.
Microsoft says a China state-aligned hacking group it tracks as Storm-0940 used ARTEX, an open-source agentic AI penetration-testing framework, to automate attacks on hundreds of organizations and was behind the recent compromise of ConnectWise’s cloud backup service. In several cases the group went from first targeting to privileged access to a company’s cloud systems in under three hours. Most of the attempts failed, but the speed left defenders very little time to respond. Agents never sleep, and that now cuts both ways.
Deals Desk
The newest compute and power deals on our tracker:
Oct 22 — Crusoe × Araico: Crusoe and Paraguayan energy and infrastructure developer Araico agreed to build an AI cloud data center next to the Itaipú substation, powered by Itaipú hydroelectric power. The site has a path to 106 MW of IT capacity, with long-term options for about 280 MW, and initial deployment is planned for mid-2027. It is Crusoe’s first dedicated AI cloud deployment in Latin America; no investment total was disclosed. Crusoe release
Oct 22 — Google × Voltus: Google expanded its Voltus agreement to fund a 1 GW virtual power plant across the PJM grid region, ten times the 100 MW deal signed earlier this year. Aggregated thermostats, batteries and industrial equipment will cut demand at peak times, freeing grid capacity rather than adding a new power plant. Dollar terms were not disclosed. Google blog
Oct 21 — Liberty Power Innovations × an unnamed frontier AI lab: Liberty Energy disclosed a strategic development agreement to supply 1.2 GW of integrated on-site power to data center campuses for an unnamed frontier AI lab and its infrastructure partner. The first energy service agreement, for about 500 MW, is targeted by December, with power coming online in phases from late 2027 to early 2029. The sites and the lab were not named. Liberty Energy Q3 release
Full tracker → theaigentic.com/deals
Yesterday’s movers
Biggest AI and tech winners and losers from Thursday’s (Oct. 22) U.S. cash session among the names we follow, a rough day when only 13 of 86 stocks closed higher. Software and services held up best: consulting giant Accenture jumped 7.69%, Adobe gained 6.07%, Intuit rose 5.75% and Salesforce added 3.52%, with cybersecurity firm Zscaler up 2.78%. Chip-supply and hardware names took the hardest hits: chip-materials supplier Entegris fell 13.12%, optical-component maker Coherent dropped 12.51%, chip-equipment maker Lam Research lost 11.76%, electronics manufacturer Celestica slid 11.69% and optical-component maker Lumentum fell 11.54%.
Prices are Thursday’s U.S. closing prices versus Wednesday’s close. Market data is a snapshot, not live.
Watch
Four picks this morning: Peter Yang on locking down your accounts after a rough week online, Fireship on the programmer stereotypes that survived AI, The AI Daily Brief on a research firm that started designing proteins, and Y Combinator with Magic Patterns on standing out when AI can design anything.
Peter Yang — The Internet Is Being Hacked. 6 Things You Need To Do Now
Peter Yang counts at least a dozen security incidents across the internet this week, half of them on a single day, and turns that into a practical checklist.
He walks through six steps to secure your accounts right now and shares a free AI prompt to help you work through them. It pairs well with this morning’s news on AI-driven attacks and agent logins.
Watch this if you have been meaning to tighten up your passwords and logins and want someone to walk you through it.
Fireship — The last real programmers are dying out...
Fireship takes a short break from a brutal week in software security to run through seven programmer stereotypes that are still hanging on in the age of AI coding.
It is quick, funny and sharper than it looks, a reminder of the habits and personalities that AI tools are reshaping inside engineering teams.
Watch this if you work with developers and want a laugh that still says something true about the job.
The AI Daily Brief — How AI is Changing What Work Means
The AI Daily Brief asks why a financial research firm, Citrini Research, ended up using AI to design proteins that target scorpion venom.
The answer opens up bigger questions: who gets to do science when the tools are this capable, whether AI labs will end up competing with their own customers, and how far a company can now push beyond what it has always done.
Watch this if you are wondering what your own business could take on now that expertise is easier to rent.
Y Combinator — How To Stand Out In A World Of AI Designs
Y Combinator talks with Alex Danilowicz of Magic Patterns, one of the fastest-growing AI design tools, which turns ideas into interactive, code-backed prototypes in minutes.
Danilowicz and his co-founder, both front-end engineers, built it to solve their own problem and were among the first teams building prompt-to-design. The conversation turns on how anything can look distinctive when everyone has the same AI design tools.
Watch this if you build products and worry that AI-made screens are all starting to look the same.