Anthropic Closes Massive $30B Round at $900B+ Valuation
Anthropic, the maker of Claude, is set to close its most ambitious funding round yet this week. The company is raising at least $30 billion at a pre-money valuation exceeding $900 billion, which would make it the world's most valuable artificial intelligence startup — surpassing rival OpenAI.
Sequoia Capital, Dragoneer Investment Group, Altimeter Capital, and Greenoaks Capital Partners are co-leading the round, each investing approximately $2 billion. Existing investors including Peter Thiel's Founders Fund and General Catalyst are also participating.
The valuation represents a staggering leap from Anthropic's $380 billion valuation set during its Series G just three months ago. The rapid ascent is fueled by Claude's accelerating enterprise adoption, with Anthropic's run-rate revenue now surpassing $30 billion — up from approximately $9 billion at the end of 2025. The company also recently expanded its compute infrastructure through a major partnership with Google and Broadcom for multiple gigawatts of next-generation compute capacity.
Dell Stock Surges 32% as AI Server Revenue Jumps 757%
Dell Technologies delivered its best trading day ever on Thursday, with shares soaring 32% after the company reported stunning Q1 fiscal 2027 earnings driven by explosive AI server demand.
The numbers are staggering: Dell recognized $16.1 billion in AI server revenue during the quarter, a 757% increase year-over-year. The company also booked $24.4 billion in AI orders and exited the quarter with a record $51.3 billion AI backlog.
Overall revenue hit a record $43.8 billion, up 88% year-over-year, while non-GAAP diluted EPS surged 214% to $4.86. Dell raised its full-year AI server revenue forecast to $60 billion, up from a previous projection of $50 billion — reflecting 144% year-over-year growth.
The results underscore the massive infrastructure buildout underway as enterprises race to deploy AI capabilities at scale. With shares now up 234% in 2026, Dell has emerged as one of the biggest beneficiaries of the AI infrastructure boom.
Microsoft Build 2026: Windows Becomes the AI Agent Platform
Microsoft Build 2026 kicks off on June 2 in San Francisco, and the company is making its biggest bet yet: transforming Windows into a full-fledged platform for autonomous AI agents.
Key announcements expected at CEO Satya Nadella's opening keynote include:
Windows Agent Framework APIs — new APIs letting developers build agents that reason, plan, and act across desktop apps, cloud services, and hardware peripherals, embedded directly into the Windows shell, task scheduler, and security model.
Windows Agent Store — a curated marketplace for agent manifests and companion services, featuring security reviews and an 85% developer revenue share.
WSL 3 — a complete re-architecture moving the Linux kernel into a lightweight VM with paravirtualized access to Windows GPU and NPU.
Azure Agent Mesh — a control plane federating agent execution across on-premises Windows servers, Windows 365 Cloud PCs, and Azure Arc-enabled edge devices.
The agent runtime preview initially supports text-based agents operating on structured data, with vision-based agents expected in 2027. The move signals Microsoft's conviction that the next computing paradigm is agent-first, not just AI-assisted.
EU Streamlines AI Act as US Take It Down Act Takes Effect
On the regulatory front, a transatlantic divergence in AI governance continues to sharpen.
The EU Council and Parliament reached a provisional agreement on May 7 to streamline the AI Act as part of the Omnibus VII legislative package. Key changes include postponing the AI regulatory sandbox deadline to August 2027, shortening the transparency compliance window from six to three months, and introducing two new prohibited practices: using AI to generate non-consensual intimate material and child sexual abuse material.
The agreement also clarifies the competences of the AI Office for supervising AI systems based on general-purpose AI models, listing exceptions where national authorities remain competent — including law enforcement, border management, judicial authorities, and financial institutions.
Meanwhile in the United States, the Take It Down Act went into effect on May 19, making it illegal to knowingly publish intimate images without consent — including AI-generated deepfakes — and requiring covered platforms to remove such content within 48 hours of receiving a victim's notice. While the EU pursues a comprehensive regulatory framework, the US continues its patchwork approach with targeted federal legislation alongside growing state-level activity.