President’s visit to the Middle East catalyzes major AI investments

Today’s Highlights:

📰 News: President Trump’s visit to the Middle East catalyzes a flood of major AI investments including the largest AI infrastructure project outside the US. 

💰 Funding: Harvey set to raise a $250M round

⚡️ Top News Stories:

1. President Trump’s visit to the Middle East has catalyzed a flood of major U.S. tech investments, including new partnerships, infrastructure projects, and the easing of export restrictions on Nvidia and AMD AI chips. The investment agreements total more than $2 Trillion with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE, spanning sectors like defense, aviation, AI, and quantum technology.

• Nvidia will supply Saudi Arabia’s new AI firm Humain with hundreds of thousands of its most advanced chips over five years, while AMD is partnering with Humain in a $10Bn initiative spanning U.S. and Saudi data centers.

• President Trump and UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed unveiled a 10-mile AI campus in Abu Dhabi, marking the largest AI infrastructure project outside the U.S., powered by 5 gigawatts of electricity and backed by American chipmakers like Nvidia and AMD.

• Amazon, Qualcomm, Cisco, Super Micro, and Google-backed funds have announced billions in new Middle East projects, from data centers to AI agent marketplaces, with OpenAI also exploring a data center buildout in the UAE.

• The Trump administration formally revoked Biden’s AI diffusion rule, replacing it with a bilateral deal-making approach that prioritizes speed and American tech exports, despite national security concerns from China hawks in Congress.

• Critics, including lawmakers and national security officials, warn that the massive influx of AI chips into Gulf nations like the UAE could lead to backdoor access by China, citing ties between regional firms like G42 and Huawei.

2. OpenAI has introduced a public-facing Safety evaluations hub that tracks how its AI models perform on tests for harmful content, jailbreaks, and hallucinations, with regular updates planned going forward.

3. OpenAI has introduced HealthBench, an open-source benchmark, developed with input from 262 physicians across 60 countries, designed to evaluate the performance and safety of LLMs in healthcare settings, setting new standards for accuracy and safety.

4. Google DeepMind’s new AI agent AlphaEvolve, powered by Gemini and evolutionary search, has begun transforming Google’s operations by inventing algorithms that boost data center efficiency, speed up AI training, and even break a 56-year-old math record — all while laying the groundwork for breakthroughs in fields like chip design and drug discovery.

5. Google's Gemini AI assistant is expanding beyond smartphones to integrate with Wear OS smartwatches, Android Auto, Google TV, and Samsung's upcoming XR headset, aiming to provide seamless, hands-free assistance across various devices.

6. Anthropic is set to release updated versions of its Claude Sonnet and Claude Opus models, featuring enhanced reasoning capabilities that allow the AI to switch between tool usage and internal problem-solving when faced with challenges. 

7. OpenAI Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki revealed that OpenAI’s next AI frontier involves developing autonomous reasoning models capable of novel scientific research, powered by reinforcement learning and large-scale compute, with an open-weight model soon to be released for academic use.

8. Google is developing an AI agent to support software developers throughout the entire engineering workflow—including coding, documentation, and process navigation—which has already been demoed to employees and select external developers ahead of its I/O conference.

9. Windsurf, the vibe-coding startup reportedly acquired by OpenAI, has launched its first in-house AI model family — SWE-1 — designed to outperform typical coding assistants by tackling full software engineering workflows across IDEs, terminals, and long-running tasks.

10. Stability AI has launched Stable Audio Open Small, a stereo audio-generating AI model optimized for smartphones that can generate short clips offline using royalty-free training data, offering a copyright-safe and fast alternative to cloud-based rivals.

11. Perplexity is launching agentic commerce in partnership with PayPal, enabling users to buy products, book trips, or check out with Venmo directly within the AI-powered chat interface, creating a seamless and secure shopping experience starting this summer in the U.S.

12. Meta’s FAIR team has released a suite of open-source breakthroughs—including a universal atomic model, a molecular discovery dataset, innovations in diffusion learning, and a neuroscience study on language learning—in a major push toward collaborative research on advanced machine intelligence.

13. OpenAI has rolled out its GPT-4.1 and GPT-4.1 mini models to ChatGPT, making GPT-4.1 available to Plus, Pro, and Team subscribers, while GPT-4.1 mini is accessible to all users, including those on the free plan.

14. Google has launched GitHub integration for Gemini Advanced users, enabling them to import public or private repositories to analyze, explain, and debug code within the chatbot.

15. TikTok has launched AI Alive, a first-of-its-kind in-app tool that lets users turn static photos into animated short videos within Stories, complete with sound and effects, while embedding transparency measures like AI labels and metadata to ensure safety and accountability.

16. Just days into his papacy, Pope Leo XIV has made AI a central concern, calling for its regulation to protect humanity’s dignity and warning of its threats to human dignity, justice, and labor in his inaugural addresses to church leaders and journalists.

💰 Top Funding News:

1. Neon, which offers a serverless Postgres database optimized for AI agent-driven workloads, was acquired by Databricks for $1B, with prior backing from M12, General Catalyst, Menlo Ventures, and Notable Capital.

2. Harvey, which uses generative AI to simplify legal research and documentation, is reportedly raising a $250M round led by Kleiner Perkins and Coatue, with participation from Sequoia Capital, at a $5B valuation.

3. Pathos AI, which uses AI to accelerate oncology drug development, raised a $365M Series D with undisclosed investors, following previous backing from New Enterprise Associates, Revolution, and Builders VC.

4. Granola, which uses AI to automate and synthesize insights from meeting and personal notes, raised a $43M Series B at a $250M valuation led by NFDG, with participation from Lightspeed, Spark, and angel investors.

5. Cognichip, which is building a foundational AI model to accelerate semiconductor development through "artificial chip intelligence," raised a $33M Seed round co-led by Lux Capital and Mayfield, with participation from FPV and Candou Ventures.

6. Hedra, which uses AI to generate expressive character-driven videos for creators and marketers, raised a $32M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Index Ventures, Abstract Ventures, a16z speedrun, and the Alexa Fund.

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