TerraSign inThe money behind the models: funding rounds, acquisitions, compute and data-centre deals, pricing moves and the earnings that show who is really paying for AI.
29 stories filed under Business since Fri, July 3, 2026, newest first. Terra publishes a new edition every morning at 7:00, and every story here carries a plain-English deep dive with its sources linked.
People familiar with the matter told the South China Morning Post that China's Moonshot AI expects to close a funding round this month at a valuation of up to $50 billion. It raised at roughly $30 billion only last month.
SpaceX reported AI revenue of $2.6 billion last quarter, more than three times a year earlier and well above the $962 million its space business brought in. The AI division still lost $1.5 billion.
AMD reported data centre revenue of $6.7 billion for the quarter, more than double a year earlier. That division is now 58% of the whole company, while gaming revenue fell 31% to $779 million.
OpenAI has published a post disputing Apple's lawsuit over former Apple employees, releasing what it says are the messages and emails behind it. This is OpenAI's account of a live legal fight, and Apple's side does not appear in it.
Situational Awareness, a fund founded in 2024 to bet on the AI supply chain, dumped billions in technology shares after it could not meet lenders' collateral demands. The Wall Street Journal put its July portfolio loss at 67 percent.
Reddit's shares fell more than 20 percent after an earnings report that beat expectations on most basic financials. Chief executive Steve Huffman called search referrals "choppy" and said Google's AI Overviews have yet to match what ten blue links delivered.
Microsoft says Microsoft 365 Copilot has passed 30 million paid seats, with quarterly net additions more than doubling. It argues the measure that matters next is not licences sold but work redesigned, and points to customers rebuilding whole processes around AI.
Apple is starting its China AI rollout with a limited set of features, but CEO Tim Cook told analysts a revamped Siri there will take longer. Sales in the region rose 22 per cent to US$18.8 billion, still short of Wall Street's estimate.
ByteDance has broken up the team behind Lark, its workplace app, and spread the pieces across its chatbot, cloud and AI applications units. The South China Morning Post reports the company's annualised AI revenue of US$4 billion now leads China.
OpenAI cut the price of GPT-5.6 Luna, its fastest and cheapest model, by 80%, effective today. Its mid-range GPT-5.6 Terra model fell 20%, and OpenAI credits efficiency work done by its own top model.
Apple will offer "some kind of upgrade possibilities on iCloud Plus where people can buy up the stack," chief executive Tim Cook said on Thursday's earnings call. The Verge reads that as paid tiers for people who use Apple Intelligence heavily.
On Meta's second-quarter earnings call, Mark Zuckerberg said personal AI helpers that act on your behalf will be the foundation for the company's next wave of products and revenue lines. He promised details soon; there is no product yet.
MIT Technology Review reports a growing global AI stock sell-off, with chip and memory shares bearing the brunt. It was partly sparked by a report that a Chinese company has started making a key piece of chip equipment for the first time.
The Verge argues that Google’s old bargain with websites—index their pages, then send traffic back—is breaking down. Reddit is reconsidering an AI training deal, publishers are weighing crawler blocks, and even Google Search is under pressure from AI.
OpenAI’s vendor-curated case studies show the same pattern across publishers: use AI to search archives, structure documents, surface leads, and keep editorial judgment with people. The examples are practical, but this OpenAI roundup is not an independent audit of their results.
According to The Verge, Midjourney has acquired free astrology app Co-Star, while founder Banu Guler will remain in charge. Guler will also become Midjourney’s chief design officer and help build its first apps, including one for image generation.
The South China Morning Post reports that Ant, Tencent, Alibaba, and Baidu used China's top AI summit to unveil self-running digital workers for everyday business operations. Ant's new platform ships with 200 ready-made templates so firms can deploy them without building from scratch.
OpenAI published "A scorecard for the AI age," aimed at finance leaders who want more value from AI budgets. It argues companies should track useful work finished per dollar, not only seats and licenses.
According to the South China Morning Post, ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent are encouraging staff to weave AI into daily work. Units of AI usage now act as a corporate allowance employees are expected to budget as proof of AI literacy.
Netflix's second-quarter earnings report says roughly 300 titles on its platform used generative AI, most of it in post-production. Netflix says it is "increasingly leveraging these tools to deliver higher quality output more quickly and at a lower cost".
OpenAI published five steps for leaders to track AI usage, control spend, and fund high-value work. It says price per million chunks of text fell 97% from GPT-4 to GPT-5.4, but useful work per dollar matters more than unit price.
Sam Altman signalled OpenAI is ready to cut prices amid Anthropic and Chinese competition, the South China Morning Post reports. He said GPT-5.6 Sol is already "half the price" of Claude Fable 5, and OpenAI is happy to deliver at "one-quarter of the price".
China's chip exports nearly doubled in the first half of 2026, customs data shows, the South China Morning Post reports. Integrated circuits reached 179.44 billion units worth US$177.28 billion, up more than 96 per cent year on year.
Alibaba and Honor plan a deeper partnership on an operating system for AI-powered devices, the South China Morning Post reports. An announcement is expected at Shanghai's WAIC starting Friday, according to people familiar with the matter.
Dongfang Suanxin, a Shanghai chip start-up backed by state funds and domestic tech giants, unveiled a plan to challenge Nvidia with alternative designs, the South China Morning Post reports. It aims to dodge US export controls by redesigning how chips move data.
Cursor launched a CFO Council of finance leaders to tackle how companies keep AI spend tied to value. Cursor says global AI spend hit $1.5 trillion in 2025, while McKinsey finds most firms still cannot link AI to EBIT.
Memory prices in Shenzhen's Huaqiangbei market have tripled over the past year amid the AI boom, the South China Morning Post reports. Some kits have risen fivefold, and only buyers with urgent need are paying the premium.
Chinese lab Zhipu launched ZCode, a tool that turns its GLM-5.2 model into a hands-off coding assistant, with discounts aimed at Anthropic's customers. Security-minded developers are reacting cautiously.
Australian gas producer Woodside runs about 50 AI systems that handle tasks on their own, from plant startups to maintenance planning. Its pilots showed maintenance hours could fall by up to 15% over five years.
Every new frontier model, upgrade and deprecation from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta and the open-weight labs. Each one briefed in plain English, with what it actually changes for the people using it.
ToolsThe products built on top of the models: coding agents, assistants, IDEs and APIs. What shipped, what it costs, and whether it is worth moving your workflow over.
ResearchThe papers, evaluations and benchmark results that move the field, translated out of arXiv dialect. Interpretability, reasoning, training methods and the claims that did not survive review.
PolicyAI regulation, law, government and safety rules: the EU AI Act, US executive action, export controls and the copyright fights. Plus the enforcement that follows once the rules land.
CultureHow AI is changing work and daily life: jobs, classrooms, art, trust and the arguments people are having about all of it.