Meta raised its 2026 AI capital expenditure forecast to $125–145 billion after Q1 earnings — nearly double the $72 billion spent in 2025 — citing higher memory pricing and aggressive infrastructure buildout. Stock fell 6% after-hours.
SpaceX preempted Cursor’s $2 billion funding round with a $10 billion “collaboration fee” plus an option to acquire the coding AI tool outright for $60 billion — after SpaceX’s IPO this summer, when it can use newly public stock to finance the deal.
Anthropic is in advanced talks to raise $50 billion at an $850–900 billion valuation — more than double its last round and higher than OpenAI’s $852 billion post-money valuation — as the company’s annualized revenue races past $30 billion.
SpaceX completed its all-stock acquisition of xAI, creating the largest private merger in history at a combined $1.25 trillion valuation — with the strategic goal of building AI data centers in orbit running on solar power.
Microsoft’s global AI diffusion report shows AI usage among working-age adults climbed from 16.3% to 17.8% in Q1 2026 — with the sharpest gains in emerging markets and the gap between AI haves and have-nots still widening.
Anthropic’s Claude Mythos Preview autonomously found and exploited thousands of critical zero-day flaws across major operating systems — and was deemed too dangerous for public release, triggering a $100M restricted-access program instead.
AI companies raised $242 billion in Q1 2026 — 80% of all global venture investment — shattering every startup funding record in history, led by OpenAI’s $122 billion round.
Canada’s Cohere and Germany’s Aleph Alpha merged at a $20 billion valuation with Schwarz Group (Lidl’s parent) backing the deal with $600 million — explicitly building a sovereign AI alternative to U.S. tech giants.
The Trump administration is planning the first official U.S.-China AI dialogue at the May 14-15 Beijing summit, focusing on autonomous weapons and unpredictable AI risks — but trust between the two powers remains near zero.
JPMorgan Chase formally moved AI out of experimental R&D into core infrastructure, backing the shift with a $19.8 billion tech budget and doubling AI use cases in production to 1,000 — CEO Dimon warned laggards risk permanent damage.