AI Chip War Heats Up: $2B+ Funding for NVIDIA Rivals, Intel Enters GPU Race | February 5, 2026

📋 Quick Takeaways

Cerebras Systems raises $1 billion at $23 billion valuation, nearly tripling in 4 months with AMD as strategic investor

ElevenLabs secures $500 million Series D at $11 billion valuation, plans expansion beyond voice into multimodal AI agents

NVIDIA and Dassault Systèmes announce strategic partnership to build industrial AI platform with “World Models”

Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan announces aggressive move into data center GPUs, hiring chief architect to challenge NVIDIA

Bedrock Robotics raises $270 million at $1.75B valuation for autonomous construction equipment

DOJ and 35 states appeal Google search antitrust ruling, seeking Chrome divestiture and end to Apple default deal

🔥 AI Chip Infrastructure & Funding

1. Cerebras Systems Raises $1 Billion at $23 Billion Valuation

Landmark Investment: NVIDIA-rival Cerebras Systems announced the closing of a $1 billion Series H financing round, nearly tripling its valuation from $8.1 billion just four months prior.

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China Approves Nvidia H200 Sales, SoftBank Eyes $30B OpenAI Investment, ASML Record Orders | January 29, 2026

📋 Quick Takeaways

China approves Nvidia H200 chip sales to ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent for 400,000+ units, marking major shift in US-China tech relations

SoftBank in talks to invest $30 billion more in OpenAI, potentially pushing valuation to $830 billion

ASML reports record Q4 orders of $15.8 billion, more than doubling analyst expectations amid AI chip demand surge

Amazon announces 16,000 layoffs, the largest workforce reduction in company history combined with October cuts

Waabi raises $1 billion and partners with Uber to deploy 25,000 robotaxis

$700M+ in major AI startup funding across autonomous vehicles, enterprise AI, and cloud infrastructure

🌏 Geopolitics & Semiconductor Trade

China Approves Nvidia H200 Chip Sales to ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent

Major Breakthrough: China granted approval for its three largest tech companies to purchase more than 400,000 Nvidia H200 AI chips, marking a significant shift in Beijing’s approach to balancing AI advancement against domestic chip industry development.