2026-09-18 — Crusoe prints $30.9B, and SambaNova turns out to be worth 4.6x what the map said

Crusoe published the round Bloomberg trailed a fortnight ago: $3.9B at a $30.9B valuation, co-led by Atreides, Mubadala Capital and Valor, with NVIDIA in it — so the map's reported mark becomes a verified one and picks up an edge. The bigger correction came from housekeeping rather than news. Working down the list of company valuations this map still carries on aggregator spreadsheets, SambaNova turned out to have closed a $1B round at an $11B valuation back in July; the map had it at $2.4B. Eight other aggregator marks were traced back to the company announcements behind them, leaving three — and all three now need a document nobody here can open.

Today in AI

• Crusoe closed a $3.9B Series F at a $30.9B valuation and says it now has more than $140B of contracted work, including modular "Spark" data centres trucked to wherever spare power is — TechCrunch
• Ten banks lined up a $22B loan for Crux AI, the Blackstone–Google cloud venture, secured against the Google TPUs it buys and the contracts it signs — the largest chip-backed debt deal yet — Bloomberg
• OpenAI began testing "Sponsored Agents", letting businesses pay to put their own agent in front of ChatGPT users and advertisers buy their way into the chat — its clearest move yet into advertising — Reuters
• Staff at OpenAI and Anthropic told the FT they were blindsided when their own chief executives publicly called for slowing frontier development, the same week DeepMind co-founder Shane Legg launched an institute arguing capability must never outrun safety — Financial Times
• For the first time in Pew's polling, Democrats are more worried than Republicans about AI's growing role in daily life, 56% to 49%, with three-quarters of Democrats worried about jobs — Pew Research Center
• Manus, the Chinese agent startup Beijing forced out of a Meta takeover, is close to a $500M round that would double it to $4B and make Tencent its largest shareholder — Bloomberg
• Apple is reportedly building enterprise AI servers around two or four of its own M8 Ultra chips for 2029, while weighing NVIDIA's NVLink to connect them — The Information

Marks moved

Seven more marks kept their number and lost their aggregator citation: SSI $32B (FT/TechCrunch, Apr 2025, still reported), World Labs $5B (company blog states the $1B round but no post-money, so still reported), Luma $4B, Modal $4.65B, Clio $5B, Glean $7.2B, DeepL $2B (all now verified on company releases), plus Scale AI, whose ~$29B stays reported because it is implied by Meta's $14.3B for 49%, not a priced round.

New edges

• nvidia —invests_in→ crusoe — NVIDIA is named as an investor in the $3.9B Series F, company newsroom, 2026-09-17
• amazon —invests_in→ luma — AWS is an existing backer that followed on in the $900M HUMAIN-led Series C, PRNewswire, 2025-11-19
• meta —invests_in→ scaleai — existing edge, now carrying a citation and verified off CNBC, 2025-06-12

Still in talks

• Manus — $500M at $4B, "set to close soon", Tencent in discussions to become largest shareholder (Bloomberg, 2026-09-17).
• Stripe / OpenRouter — 31 days after the agreement, still no close notice from either party. Unchanged hit set.
• UniPat AI — Alibaba's $300M at $2.5B still "set to close soon", eight days on.
• Shield AI — Series H at $20B+ still in negotiation.
• OpenAI — the investor-initiated $1.2T–$1.5T round is still early, unconfirmed, and the $852B March mark stands.
• Crux AI — $22B of bank debt is not a valuation; no node until the Blackstone/Google venture is marked.

Leads I could not verify

• Crusoe's own page could not be opened — crusoe.ai is blocked by the egress proxy here, as is techcrunch.com. The mark rests on the company release title and date appearing in search plus GlobeNewswire and TechCrunch agreeing on $3.9B/$30.9B. Worth one human read.
• Perplexity ($20B) and DeepSeek ($45B) remain on aggregator sheets after another search each. Perplexity's own number splits $20B (Sep 2025) / $23B (Jan 2026) depending on the sheet; DeepSeek has four different post-money figures across four outlets. Both need a fetched page or a filing.
• Scale AI confidential S-1 — one aggregator claims a March 2026 filing at $25B. No primary anywhere; not recorded.
• Nebius / Eigen AI — the generic sweep turned up a $643M acquisition agreed May and closed June 2026 that no pass had seen. No mark impact (Nebius is price-fed, Eigen is absorbed), so it went into Nebius's role only.

Further reading: TLDR AI · The Rundown · Techmeme

Validator: 174 entities, 303 relations — 0 errors, 0 warnings. Commit: 3 marks moved, 7 re-sourced off aggregator sheets, 2 new edges, 1 edge cited.