TG-AI-F: AI = raise billions → spend billions → rinse and repeat
From mega-rounds to mega-deals to mega-earnings, it’s just another week in AI—full of jaw-dropping bets.
Happy Friday!
It’s only the end of January and the joint is already jumping when it comes to AI mega-deals, mega-rounds, mega-earnings announcements and much more, well, MEGA $$$$$.
Psst: Did you hear that OpenAI is in talks to raise as much as $100 Billion in fresh mega-bucks? According to the New York Times, the company is in talks with tech giants and Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds for a funding round that could value the company at $750 billion or more (!!!).
And two days ago, Anthropic closed its latest funding round at over $10 billion which, somehow, could go even higher.
Oh, and just yesterday, Elon Musk’s Tesla announced an agreement to invest $2 billion in — yup — Elon Musk’s xAI, which competes with OpenAI. The money-go-round won’t end there: SpaceX is reportedly in merger talks with xAI ahead of a potential IPO this year. Some are even salivating about a potential $2 trillion IPO!
I know these are a lot of exclamation points, but how else can I communicate the sheer exclamation-pointy-ness of these deals?
Spend on AI like it’s 2026
And that’s just the fundraising. How about the spend? I reported this week that on Meta’s 4th quarter earnings call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg predicted his company would experience a “major AI acceleration” in 2026 as it races to catch up after falling behind Google, OpenAI and Anthropic in leading AI models in 2025.
Now, Meta forecast its capital expenditures could rise to as much as $135 billion this year, nearly double the $72 billion it reported in 2025, as it unveiled its most radical AI spending plans to date, largely driven by increased investment in AI infrastructure costs and talent. (Speaking of talent, I’m still waiting to be able to actually speak to Meta’s highest-profile talent, former Scale CEO Alexandr Wang, now head of Meta Superintelligence Labs. I’m told he won’t speak until Meta comes out with its new models. I’ll wait.)
Much of that spend will be on Meta’s massive AI data centers and related infrastructure, like the $6 billion deal they just cut with Corning for the 175-year-old company’s fiber optic cables — I wrote about that this week, too.
That kind of data center spend can worry investors, though. Microsoft’s stock shares dove yesterday as the company’s data center spending overshadowed their massive earnings surge.
Raising billions to spend billions
But never mind — apparently there is still room in 2026 for AI startups that raise billions even though they have no products and no revenue, just some eager investors.
This Wall Street Journal piece digs into Flapping Airplanes (a reference to the biological cues future AI should take from nature), which it says is “part of a new wave of startups some have dubbed ‘neolabs,’ which give priority to long-term research and developing new AI models over immediate profits.” Profits, shmofits, amirite?
The bottom line: across much of the AI industry, from tech giants to well-funded startups, the cycle is clear—raise or earn billions, spend even more, rinse and repeat. For now, anyway.