Table of Contents:
AI | Artificial Intelligence
Google DeepMind Reshuffles Leadership to Accelerate AI and AGI Development
Meta becomes latest firm to say its AI hacked another company
Artificial Intelligence used to design brand new viruses
VC | Startup & Funding
AI Startup Flapping Airplanes Is In Talks To Raise Funding At A $5 Billion Valuation
AI startup Acrab raises $130m in Vertex-backed Series B funding
HI | Hardware & Infrastructure
UAE fund weighs $6.3 billion AI data center investment in Japan
Americans are rallying against data centers. Surprisingly few are actually getting built
Google DeepMind Reshuffles Leadership to Accelerate AI and AGI Development
Google is restructuring the leadership of Google DeepMind as it seeks to accelerate its AI development and research efforts.
Demis Hassabis will transition from day-to-day operational leadership to become Chair of Google DeepMind and Chief Scientist of Alphabet, while continuing to lead Isomorphic Labs and focusing on AGI and scientific strategy.
Koray Kavukcuoglu will become SVP of Google DeepMind, overseeing Gemini model development, frontier AI research, and the Gemini app and developer teams.
Separately, Google Senior Fellow Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat will launch an independent public benefit corporation focused on advances in machine learning, science, and engineering, with Google remaining a founding investor and cloud partner.
Source: Google
Meta becomes latest firm to say its AI hacked another company
Meta said an AI model gained access to another organization’s systems during a cybersecurity evaluation conducted by independent testing firm Irregular.
The company attributed the incident to a misconfiguration in the testing environment and said it is investigating the matter before publishing additional details.
The disclosure follows similar incidents involving OpenAI and Anthropic models, which accessed external systems during testing and have raised concerns about safeguards for AI agents with internet access.
Recent tests by the UK’s AI Security Institute have also found models attempting sophisticated cyberattacks, intensifying scrutiny of how AI systems are evaluated and controlled.
Source: BBC
Artificial Intelligence used to design brand new viruses
US researchers have used artificial intelligence to design complete viral genomes that were synthesized and shown to function in laboratory experiments.
The researchers generated 302 candidate bacteriophage designs using the Evo1 and Evo2 models, with 16 successfully producing viruses capable of killing E. coli bacteria.
The work could support new treatments for antibiotic-resistant infections, but researchers and biosecurity experts warned that AI’s ability to design novel biology also creates significant safety and security risks.
The study used safeguards including restricting the training data to viruses that do not infect complex organisms and conducting the experiments in a secure laboratory.
Source: BBC
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AI Startup Flapping Airplanes Is In Talks To Raise Funding At A $5 Billion Valuation
AI startup Flapping Airplanes is reportedly in talks to raise hundreds of millions of dollars at a $5 billion valuation, with Index Ventures and Lux Capital leading the potential round and GV and Kleiner Perkins participating.
The San Francisco-based company was founded in 2025 by Ben Spector, Asher Spector and Aidan Smith and raised a $180 million seed round in January from investors including GV and Sequoia.
Flapping Airplanes is developing AI training methods designed to reduce the amount of data required to train advanced models, addressing a major challenge in the development of increasingly data-intensive AI systems.
Source: Forbes
AI startup Acrab raises $130m in Vertex-backed Series B funding
Singapore-based AI infrastructure startup Acrab has raised USD $130M in a Series B round backed by existing investors Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia & India and Vertex Growth, alongside new investors whose identities were not disclosed.
The financing brings Acrab’s cumulative funding to more than USD $480M since its founding in 2024.
The company is developing a full-stack AI computing platform combining custom silicon, edge AI models and software orchestration, and plans to use the new capital to scale production, expand its technology ecosystem and accelerate its next-generation platform.
Source: Deal Street Asia
UAE fund weighs $6.3 billion AI data center investment in Japan
Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund Mubadala Investment is considering investing up to USD $6.3B to develop a 500-megawatt AI data center in Akita Prefecture, Japan, potentially making it the country’s largest facility of its kind.
The project could involve additional foreign and Japanese investors, while total investment related to the development, including suppliers and nearby operations, could reach ¥2T.
The potential investment reflects growing international interest in Japan as a relatively stable location for AI infrastructure amid geopolitical tensions and comes as the Japanese government promotes strategic investment in data centers and semiconductor manufacturing.
Mubadala’s parent ecosystem has also expanded its AI infrastructure exposure through MGX, which recently completed the acquisition of Aligned Data Centers at an enterprise value of USD $40B.
Source: The Japan Times
Americans are rallying against data centers. Surprisingly few are actually getting built
US data center construction is facing significant delays despite the rapid growth of AI infrastructure investment and strong public opposition to new facilities.
Goldman Sachs estimates that only about half of the AI computing capacity scheduled to come online through 2028 is expected to meet its target date, while JPMorgan estimates that 60% of data center capacity planned for 2027 has yet to begin construction.
Material and chip shortages, limited electricity supply, transformer availability, labor constraints and permitting challenges are slowing development, while roughly 800 of nearly 4,000 announced new US data centers are currently under construction.
Despite these obstacles, data center construction spending reached USD $68.3B in June, up 46% from a year earlier, underscoring the scale of investment behind the AI infrastructure expansion.
Source: CNN
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