Top News | OpenAI, Broadcom team on AI chip: This marks the first-ever custom AI chip developed by the ChatGPT maker, which worked in collaboration with Broadcom on the design. For now, Jalapeño remains in the testing phase, but Broadcom reports that the chip provides equivalent inference performance while draining about 50% less energy, compared to a standard AI GPU. It’s expected to head from the lab into data centers, including some operated by OpenAI partner Microsoft, by the end of this year. In all, OpenAI plans to spend “tens of billions of dollars” on Broadcom chips in the coming years, possibly with additional financing provided by Apollo Global Management and Blackstone. One pressing question still remains: is there a tilde in the proper name Jalapeño? Many sources do include it… but not Bloomberg… NSA was in the middle of using Mythos: The New York Times reports that cybersecurity analysts at the National Security Agency (NSA) were busy testing Anthropic’s latest and most powerful models (Mythos and Fable 5) when the federal government suddenly demanded the company shut off access. Apparently, the results of these early tests “proved impressive,” even among hardened NSA specialists, and “alarmed” some analysts with their ability to surface never-before-found software vulnerabilities. During a congressional hearing this month, NSA Chief Gen. Joshua Rudd told lawmakers that Mythos “broke into almost all of our classified systems, not in weeks, but in hours.” Fortunately, the NSA may not have to wait too much longer to get their Mythos access restored. Wired suggests that the Trump administration is having an easier time negotiating with Anthropic now that co-founder Tom Brown has stepped in to replace CEO Dario Amodei at the table. Ornn raises $33M funding round: The New York startup created what it calls a “compute futures exchange,” essentially a commodity market for GPU compute, as opposed to natural gas or wheat or oranges. For startups looking to train fresh AI models, the current GPU marketplace can be both volatile and opaque, making it difficult to lock in predictable costs. Ornn aims to turn GPU compute hours into a standardized financial product, allowing data center and cloud operators to presell capacity and exploit hedges to create more stabilized revenue, while allowing AI companies to lock in training and inference costs with certainty. The startup’s latest $33 million round (on top of a $5.7 million seed round in 2025) was led by Andreessen Horowitz. It’s apparently the firm’s first investment in a compute marketplace.
| TWiST 500 | It’s increasingly obvious from monitoring the T500 day to day that M&A activity is heating up. We’re saying goodbye to more and more former startups each week. | The latest teary farewell goes out to our Friends of the Pod at Modular, the “unified stack” AI infrastructure company. The problem: AI workflows often crisscross between various devices and systems, even utilizing chips from different suppliers. Doing away with this “fragmented infrastructure” locks in a significant jump in performance without spending more on compute. | Modular is getting acquired by chip makers Qualcomm for about $3.9 billion in stock. The transaction will likely close in the second half of this year. | And that’s not all! Agility Robotics — the company behind the industrial humanoid robot Digit — plans to go public in a SPAC deal valued at $2.5 billion. Agility will merge with the special-purpose acquisition company Churchill Capital Corp. XI to complete the transaction. They’re anticipating proceeds of around $600 million total from the deal, including cash from Churchill and investments from electronics manufacturer (and prior Agility investor) Foxconn. | Digit robots are already in use, primarily for moving and stacking heavy containers, in warehouses and factories owned by Amazon, Schaeffler, Toyota, GXO, and others. According to CEO Peggy Johnson, Agility hopes to gain an early mover advantage by being one of the first standalone humanoid robotics stocks available to retail investors. – Lon | A message from CrowdHealth | CrowdHealth lets you ditch the bureaucracy with a peer-to-peer funding platform for your healthcare. Get started for $99 per month for your first three months by using the code TWIST at JoinCrowdHealth.com/twist. | *CrowdHealth is not insurance; it's the superior way to pay for healthcare | This Week in Startups | E2303: Two fascinating new interviews with great founders on this Monday special. First up, Jason and Lon chat with Louis Phillips, the creator of Australia’s white-hot fitness app INTVL. The app gamifies your daily run, turning neighborhoods into “turf wars” that you win just by jogging around the block… until someone else doesn’t retrace your steps. Find out how Louis grew the project to over 1M users with zero paid ads. Then, Alice Zhang of Verge Labs stops by to discuss the startup’s recent name change and pivot, and how they managed to assemble one of the world’s largest proprietary brain tissue data sets. | E2302: Anthropic stabbed Cursor in the back. Then SpaceX swooped in with $60 billion. Today, TWiST connects the dots on the biggest deal in AI since the Microsoft-OpenAI partnership, and why it's a warning sign for every startup building on top of a frontier model. Jason is joined by Bling Capital’s Ben Ling, Banana Capital’s Turner Novak, and co-host Alex to go deep on the future of coding models, the current golden age of venture liquidity, OpenAI’s financials, and the ‘Four Ds’ of venture investing. The show closes with a tribute to Josh Baer, the founder of Capital Factory. | E2301: Lon and Jason chat with Skyler Chan, the founder of GRU Space. You may have heard of them during their viral press run earlier this year, after announcing plans to build a hotel on the Moon. (Reserve your spot today for just $1 million!) But beyond the marketing hype, GRU has a real plan to autonomously manufacture bricks out of lunar regolith, which can then be used to build any kind of structure, including an American moon base. PLUS we’re selecting the winner of our $5K bounty for a live AI podcast fact checker. Lon demos all three finalists, then Jason selects his fave. | TWiST Partner Offers | LinkedIn Jobs: Post your job for free at linkedIn.com/twist then promote it to get access to LinkedIn Jobs’ new AI assistant. Northwest Registered Agent: Get more when you start your business with Northwest. In 10 clicks and 10 minutes, you can form your company and walk away with a real business identity — Learn more at www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twist. Deel: Founders scale faster on Deel. Set up payroll for any country in minutes, hire anyone anywhere, get visas handled fast, and get back to building. Visit https://deel.com/twist to learn more.
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