Foundations by Axented
Anthropic opens Seoul office and announces new partnerships, xAI releases Grok Imagine Video 1.5, Sarvam secures $234 million funding round while Gradial grabs $65M
Table of Contents:
AI | Artificial Intelligence
Anthropic opens Seoul office and announces new partnerships across the Korean AI ecosystem
xAI releases Grok Imagine Video 1.5
VC | Startup & Funding
Sarvam becomes India’s newest AI unicorn with $234 million funding round led by HCLTech
Agentic marketing AI startup Gradial grabs $65M in fresh funding
HI | Hardware & Infrastructure
Nearly 80% of data center capacity is at elevated risk to climate hazards like flooding and fire
Nothing CEO says phone prices are going to keep going up
Anthropic opens Seoul office and announces new partnerships across the Korean AI ecosystem
Anthropic has opened a Seoul office and announced a series of partnerships with Korean companies, research institutions, and public-sector organizations to expand adoption of its Claude AI models.
The company also signed a memorandum of understanding with South Korea’s Ministry of Science and ICT focused on AI safety, cybersecurity, and model evaluation in Korean.
Major organizations including NAVER, Samsung SDS, LG CNS, Nexon, and Hanwha are deploying Claude products, while Anthropic is extending support to researchers through the National AI Research Lab consortium.
The move reflects Anthropic’s effort to deepen its presence in one of its fastest-growing international markets.
Source: Anthropic
xAI releases Grok Imagine Video 1.5
xAI has released Grok Imagine Video 1.5, a new version of its image-to-video generation model that the company says improves motion quality, physics simulation, audio generation, and speech synchronization.
The update is now generally available through the Imagine API, while a faster variant has been rolled out on Grok’s web and mobile apps.
xAI says the new model can generate six-second 720p videos in roughly 25 seconds, significantly faster than the previous version.
The company also introduced workflow features such as projects, parallel generation agents, and searchable media libraries.
Source: xAI
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Sarvam becomes India’s newest AI unicorn with $234 million funding round led by HCLTech
Indian AI startup Sarvam has raised $234 million at a $1.5 billion valuation, making it the country’s newest AI unicorn.
The funding round is led by HCLTech, which is contributing $150 million and plans to help commercialize Sarvam’s technology through its enterprise customer network.
Sarvam develops AI models, infrastructure, and applications tailored to Indian languages and industries, and says its products are already deployed across government, financial services, agriculture, and defense.
The company plans to use the funding to advance research in agentic AI, coding, cybersecurity, and expanded computing infrastructure.
Source: Tech Crunch
Agentic marketing AI startup Gradial grabs $65M in fresh funding
Gradial, a startup developing AI agents for marketing operations, has raised $65 million in new funding as investor interest in enterprise AI automation continues to grow.
The company focuses on automating tasks such as campaign execution, content production, and workflow management, aiming to reduce manual work for marketing teams.
The investment is intended to support product development and expansion as businesses increasingly adopt agent-based software tools.
The deal highlights continued venture capital activity around AI systems designed to handle complex business processes.
Source: Silicon Angle
Nearly 80% of data center capacity is at elevated risk to climate hazards like flooding and fire
A recent study found that the environmental footprint of data centers has grown to a scale comparable with some of the world’s largest countries, driven in part by rising demand for artificial intelligence.
Researchers estimate that global data centers consumed more electricity than all but a handful of nations in 2025, while also generating substantial carbon emissions and water consumption.
The report projects that energy use, emissions, and associated environmental impacts could roughly double by 2030 if current growth trends continue.
The findings add to concerns about the sustainability challenges posed by rapid AI infrastructure expansion.
Source: CNBC
Nothing CEO says phone prices are going to keep going up
Nothing CEO Carl Pei says smartphone prices are likely to continue rising because of escalating memory costs, with RAM now accounting for more than half the hardware cost of some devices.
Pei said memory prices for the company’s Phone 4A doubled between development and launch and have since doubled again, reflecting a broader industry shortage.
He warned that consumers should not expect the same level of discounts during the holiday shopping season and predicted further price increases into next year.
Other smartphone makers, including Samsung and Google, are also expected to face higher costs tied to memory components.
Source: The Verge
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