AI Investing Splits as Venture Capital Surges and Public Markets Grow Wary of Data Center Spending
Venture capital keeps funding AI startups, but public investors are growing wary of data center spending, creating a volatile split in AI investing, according to SiliconANGLE.
This week brought continued large venture investments in AI companies including OpenAI, DeepSeek, Legora, Otter.ai, and Flapping Airplanes, SiliconANGLE reported. But on Thursday, concerns about potentially excessive data center spending—such as Meta’s plan to issue new shares to pay for further expansion—drove AI stocks including SpaceX and CoreWeave sharply lower. Public sentiment toward AI and the data centers needed to power it has soured, adding to investor caution, the report said.
The volatility is unlikely to ease soon. More major earnings reports are due next week from Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Intel. Anthropic’s planned initial public offering also looms, with some wondering whether it will absorb so much public investor money that appetite for other AI stocks will be blunted, according to the report.
Excitement among AI users and technology providers remained undiminished at several conferences this week, including Nvidia’s GTC in Berlin and the PyTorch Conference and AGNTCon+MCPCon in San Jose. Nvidia introduced new reference architectures. At PyTorch, Google and Amazon Web Services offered new tools leveraging the open-source deep learning framework to gain more control over AI factories that use Nvidia technologies.
At AGNTCon, the Linux Foundation’s Agentic AI Foundation released open AI agent protocols intended to prevent big technology companies from dominating key agent protocols and rails. Manik Surtani, co-founder and chief technology officer of the Agentic AI Foundation, said during a keynote that the plumbing of the agentic era should not belong to one entity, according to SiliconANGLE.
AI also found long-hidden vulnerabilities in PHP, the open-source scripting language for the web, forcing about 70% of websites to scramble for patches—a process that takes time, leaving many sites and their users still at risk, the report said. The rising capability of AI in finding vulnerabilities means the defensive edge AI provided defenders so far is fading or already gone.
ServiceNow is aiming for a pole position in AI with its new AI Control Tower, which is designed to discover and govern any agent, work across models and clouds, track cost and value, and shut down behavior that violates policy, according to SiliconANGLE.
Other funding and deal news this week included DeepSeek reportedly raising $15 billion days after U.S. restrictions, as reported by Bloomberg; Tractian raising $130 million at a $1.4 billion valuation for physical AI; Daytona hitting a $1 billion valuation with a $60 million Series B for AI agent cloud; and Boomi acquiring Elementary Data to bring trusted, governed data to the AI era, SiliconANGLE reported.
Anthropic’s S-1 filing showed red-hot growth, risks, and massive computing costs, according to the Wall Street Journal. Next week also brings Oracle AI World in Las Vegas and theCUBE’s and theCUBE Research’s virtual AI Cybersecurity & Resiliency Summit, SiliconANGLE noted.