In June, AI's Biggest Business Stories Focused on Money & Compute
- Jul 7
- 3 min read
Airbus and Mistral Show AI Is Becoming Part of Industrial Infrastructure
Airbus, Europe's largest aerospace company, signed a five-year partnership with French AI startup Mistral covering production automation, engineering and design, onboard AI for aircraft and spacecraft, and defense applications.
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SoftBank Commits Up to €75B for AI Infrastructure in France
SoftBank is committing up to €75 billion (about $87 billion) to build 5 gigawatts of AI data center capacity in France, with a first phase of €45 billion delivering 3.1 gigawatts by 2031, with Founder Masayoshi Son framing the AI buildout as a once-in-a-generation infrastructure shift.
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Alphabet Raises the Stakes on AI Infrastructure Spending, Planning to Raise $80B
Alphabet announced it is raising $80 billion by selling stock to fund data centers, chips, and compute, and stated that demand for its AI solutions is exceeding available supply.
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Google Agrees to Pay SpaceX $920M Per Month for Compute
Google reportedly agreed to pay SpaceX roughly $920 million per month from October 2026 through June 2029 for access to about 110,000 NVIDIA GPUs, calling it short-term "bridge capacity" after demand for its Gemini Enterprise and AI agent products came in stronger than expected.
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Asana Buys Its Way Into the No-Code AI Agent Race
Asana acquired no-code AI workflow platform StackAI for $75 million to accelerate its shift from a place where work is tracked to a platform where work gets done by humans and AI agents together.
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SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI Head to Public Markets in One of the Biggest AI IPO Moments Yet
Within about two weeks, three of the most talked-about AI and AI-adjacent companies moved toward public markets: SpaceX is reportedly targeting a roughly $1.75 trillion valuation in what could be the largest IPO ever, Anthropic filed with the SEC near a $965 billion valuation on a reported $47 billion annualized revenue run rate, and OpenAI began the process while signaling it "may be a while."
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ChatGPT Passes a Billion Monthly Users, but Its Market Share Slips Below 50%
ChatGPT became the fastest app ever to reach a billion monthly users, yet its market share dipped below 50% for the first time as Gemini (662 million users) and Claude (245 million) gained ground.
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Salesforce Announced an Acquisition to Drive Agentic Capabilities
Salesforce announced it is buying AI customer service platform Fin (formerly Intercom) for about $3.6 billion to accelerate its agentic offerings, gaining an AI agent that resolves queries across chat, email, WhatsApp, text, phone, and Slack and is powered by Fin's proprietary Apex model.
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Meta Pauses Invasive Computer Tracking After an Internal Leak
Meta paused a program that recorded employees' screen activity to train models after leaked screenshots exposed private conversations, performance data, and transcripts to the entire company.
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Meta Sued Over Copyright Infringement by a Porn Company
Strike 3 Holdings is suing Meta for allegedly downloading 2,400 of its films to train AI models, while Meta argues the downloads could have come from employees, contractors, or individuals and says it is investigating.
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Nvidia's New Liquid Cooling Could Cut Data Center Water and Energy Use
Nvidia introduced a closed-loop liquid cooling system that works like a car's radiator, circulating a coolant (about 75% water, 25% antifreeze) through micro-tubes on the chips so heat is pulled away without evaporation.
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