AI Industry Development & Policy Dynamics

According to Illuminate Financial, the London-based venture capital firm closed a $135 million early growth fund to invest in Series B and later-stage enterprise AI and fintech startups. The fund's backers include eight major financial institutions: BNP Paribas, Citi, Deutsche Börse, HSBC,

According to Financial Times, SoftBank Group plans to establish and list an independent artificial intelligence robotics and data center company called Roze in the United States this year, with a target valuation of $100 billion. CEO Masayoshi Son is driving the initiative, which aims to

According to Jin Ten, Anthropic is planning a new fundraising round on April 30 that would value the company above $900 billion, potentially making it the world's most valuable AI startup and surpassing OpenAI. The company's management is reviewing multiple investor proposals that could more than

AI developer Anthropic is in the preliminary assessment stage of a new round of fundraising, and the market valuation could exceed 9,000 billion USD. If this round of fundraising is completed successfully, the company could surpass its competitor OpenAI and become the AI startup with the highest valuation worldwide. With the rapid adoption of generative AI technology, Anthropic is actively seeking funding to expand its infrastructure, and it has been reported that its initial public offering (IPO) could take place as early as October this year. Tech giants such as Google and Amazon have previously invested heavily, indicating that the capital markets attach great importance to its technological potential. ## Anthropic Fundraising Scale and Valuation Growth Analysis Citing people familiar with the matter, Bloomberg reports that Anthropic is in the preliminary assessment stage of a new round of fundraising, and its corporate valuation could exceed 9,000 billion USD. With this year

Market rotation is splitting attention between meme coins and infrastructure-driven blockchain projects. TAO and FIL reflect stronger alignment with emerging tech and data infrastructure narratives. DOGE and SHIB remain primarily driven by retail sentiment and short-term volatility

According to reports, Anthropic is weighing offers from investors as its valuation in the secondary market approaches $1 trillion. The discussions remain in early stages as the company seeks additional infrastructure to support growing demand for its products. It's worth noting that Anthropic's

Amazon’s first-quarter revenue was $181.5 billion, up 17% year over year. AWS posted quarterly revenue of $37.6 billion, up 28% year over year—its highest level in three years—supported by investments in new AI startups. Over the past 12 months, equipment spending totaled $151.0 billion, leading free cash flow to fall to $1.2 billion. E-commerce and advertising maintained steady growth, while shutting down some Fresh and Go physical stores to focus on digital and cloud investments. The market still has doubts about near-term liquidity, but the AI-driven AWS rebound has been recognized.

Microsoft’s latest earnings report shows that cloud growth is slightly above expectations, but AI monetization still hasn’t fully met the market’s expectations. Copilot’s paid users increased to 20 million, with an annualized revenue run rate exceeding $37 billion. Office revenue is higher, but the growth has not satisfied some investors. Capital expenditures of $31.9 billion grew 49%, but this is below analysts’ valuations; delays in infrastructure expansion have become a growth bottleneck. As competition with Amazon and Google accelerates, the stock price has been affected, and investors remain cautious about the prospects for its market share growth.

Meta releases its quarterly earnings report. Revenue was $56.3 billion, up 33% year over year. EPS was 7.31, higher than expected, but daily active users edged down to 3.56 billion. It raised full-year capital expenditures to $125–145 billion, driven by higher data center costs and rising hardware prices. After-hours shares fell by about 7%. At the same time, it laid off employees and launched a new AI model, Muse Spark, to improve efficiency. Facing risks from strict regulations and lawsuits, its long-term profitability remains uncertain.

Google and Microsoft reported earnings after the bell on Wednesday, with both crushing expectations. Alphabet's Q1 2026 revenue reached $109.9 billion, up 22% year-over-year, while Google Cloud brought in $20.03 billion—up 63% from $12.26 billion in Q1 2025. Microsoft posted $82.9 billion in revenue

Alphabet Q1 revenue and EPS both beat expectations. Cloud revenue reached $20 billion, and unfulfilled orders doubled to $460 billion. Capital expenditures were raised to $185 billion, and in 2027 they will be higher than in 2026. Gemini Enterprise users grew, and search queries hit a new high; AI answers are affecting the advertising model. The stock rose about 6% after hours to $370, setting a new all-time high.

NVIDIA’s deep learning vice president says that keeping the cost of running AI models is far higher than labor payroll, showing that in practice AI may not necessarily reduce labor costs. A 2024 MIT study found that AI automation is economically beneficial for about 23% of jobs, while the remaining 77% still rely primarily on human labor. Global tech giants’ investments in AI infrastructure remain high; in the short term, financial pressure and layoffs occur at the same time. However, if the process can be stabilized at a larger scale and with lower oversight costs, there may still be cost reductions and economic benefits in the long run.

Crypto exchange OKX rolled out its Agent Payments Protocol (APP) on Wednesday, an open standard designed to support AI agents conducting full business cycles beyond simple payments. According to OKX, the protocol enables AI bots to "pay for services and pay each other" while handling quoting,

According to Beating, AI platform Rogo designed for high-frequency financial scenarios completed a $160 million Series D funding round in April 2026, led by Kleiner Perkins with participation from Sequoia, Thrive Capital, Khosla Ventures, and J.P. Morgan. The funding came less than three months

According to official sources, a major cryptocurrency exchange has launched the Agent Payments Protocol (APP), an open payment standard for AI Agent commercial transactions on April 29. The protocol enables AI Agents to process single payments, batch payments, usage-based payments, and escrow paymen

According to PANews, on April 29, China's National Development and Reform Commission investment security review office banned a foreign acquisition of the Manus project and required the transaction be terminated. Manus, billed as the world's first general artificial intelligence agent, had

According to Alibaba Cloud, its Bailian platform will reduce the pricing for DeepSeek-V4-Pro model's implicit cache (Implicit Cache) to 1 yuan per million tokens effective April 29, 2026 at 23:59:59 Beijing time. Implicit cache only applies when requests hit the cache; cached input tokens are

BlockBeats message, April 29, a leading exchange will list the USDⓈ-M AIGENSYNUSDT perpetual contract at 14:15 (UTC) on April 29, supporting up to 20x leverage. According to the announcement, AIGENSYN corresponds to the project Gensyn. It is positioned as a decentralized machine intelligence protocol, aiming to integrate data and compute power into a unified open network.

According to ChainCatcher, Nasdaq-listed Eightco Holdings disclosed its latest portfolio holdings on April 29, with total assets valued at approximately $333 million. The holdings include 283.45 million Worldcoin (WLD) tokens, 11,068 ETH, a $90 million