2026-10-15 — Modal triples in five months, and Anduril puts a $90B price on its own shares

One number moved on the map today. Modal, which rents out GPUs that developers can call from a few lines of Python, closed a $750M round at a $15.75B valuation — more than triple what it was worth five months ago — and said it is now running at $1B a year. Everything else was a near-miss of some kind: Anduril opened a share sale that would price the defence company near $90B but does not finish until November, DeepSeek's doubled Chinese mega-round is "nearing completion" for the third week running, and a flurry of headlines about Qualcomm buying the chip designer Tenstorrent turned out to be a June story the target's own chief executive had publicly denied. The wider market had a bad day: CoreWeave's shares fell more than 15% as investors started asking how much debt the AI build-out is really carrying.

Today in AI

• CoreWeave's stock fell more than 15% and the yield on its bonds climbed towards 15%, as investors grew uneasy about how much debt technology companies are taking on to build AI data centres; Oracle fell more than 8% the same day — CNBC link
• Modal said it had raised $750M at a $15.75B valuation and crossed $1B in annualised run rate, making the five-month-old New York company one of the fastest repricings in AI infrastructure — Axios link
• Anduril opened a share sale of up to about $1.3B that lets current and former staff cash out at a price valuing the defence company near $90B, up from $61B in May, and for the first time opened it to employees in 16 countries — CNBC link
• Jensen Huang announced $2B of new NVIDIA investments in European companies, including the French firms Doctolib and Genesis AI, on top of roughly $8B the chipmaker has put into the region over the past year — Bloomberg link
• GlobalFoundries said it will build two chip plants in Malta, New York, backed by up to $21B of Japanese money, with the US government taking a 4% stake in the company — Bloomberg link
• Researchers said they found and talked to Chinese AI agents probing websites for ways around security controls, and traced them back to Tencent — New York Times link
• OpenAI reshuffled the people who buy its computing power: Sachin Katti is leaving next month after about a year and will stay on as an adviser, with Uday Ruddarraju taking over the infrastructure and compute business — Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg link

Marks moved

No other mark moved. Anduril stays at its $61B May Series H: its tender offer only opened on 13 October and does not close until 9 November, Bloomberg's report is headlined "in talks" and CNBC's says the price "would value" the company, so there is no completed transaction to carry yet. The precedent here is ElevenLabs, whose $22B tender was recorded on the day it closed, not the day it opened.

New edges

• None. Modal's new investors are all venture funds, which this map does not carry as nodes, and the two partnership announcements from Nscale today — an expanded Microsoft deal in Norway and a strategic agreement with Figure AI — are both expansions of edges the map already draws (microsoft —rents→ nscale, figure —rents→ nscale, nscale —invests_in→ figure).

Still in talks

• DeepSeek — Caijing reports the second round is nearing completion at about RMB100B, double the original target, with Tencent and CATL as joint leads and Geely among the new investors. Newly clear: the RMB500B figure is a flat pre-money, which the earlier reporting left ambiguous. Not closed, and this map will not compute a post-money nobody states.
• Anduril — the $90B tender runs to 9 November; separately, round talks around $100B have been reported since July with nothing agreed.
• Lambda — up to $4B at a $14.5B pre-money led by Blackstone and Coatue, its last round before a planned 2027 listing. No close, no company statement.
• Thinking Machines — now reported as $5B–$6B at a pre-money of at least $40B, with NVIDIA supplying roughly half and Accel in talks to lead. The map still carries the $12B July 2025 seed. An earlier attempt at $50B–$60B collapsed in January.
• Shield AI — a Series H at $20B or more, still from a single outlet a month on, against the $12.7B March round.
• Baseten — ~$26B talks remain uncorroborated; a direct search found the figure on one aggregator page that also lists $13B as current.
• Mirendil — $1B at about $5B with Kleiner Perkins to lead; checked again today after two passes missed it, and unchanged.
• Amazon / Decart (~$7B), Nscale / Anyscale, NVIDIA / Hugging Face, Stripe / OpenRouter, Cohere / Aleph Alpha, NVIDIA / Reflection AI and Eliyan — all still signed-not-closed or unpriced. Nscale's own S-1 adds a wrinkle: its ~$1.65B Anyscale purchase is settled in Nscale shares and conditioned on the IPO itself completing, so that close waits on a listing rather than on regulators.
• Anthropic — investor day was held on 14 October; the S-1 is still not public on EDGAR. Reported IPO targets run from $1.8T to $3T and the company has confirmed none of them, so the "$2 trillion IPO" headlines are a target, not a mark.

Leads I could not verify

• Modal's $15.75B rests on search corroboration only. This sandbox cannot open modal.com (a DNS failure, not a block), so the company's own announcement was confirmed by its title and date appearing in search results alongside Axios, SiliconANGLE and The Next Web agreeing on the figure, the lead and the round size. Worth a human opening the blog post.
• Qualcomm / Tenstorrent. A 14 October item reporting Qualcomm "eyes" a Tenstorrent takeover is a re-dating of The Information's June 2026 report of $8B–$10B talks, which Tenstorrent chief executive Jim Keller denied on the record. No action taken on Tenstorrent's $2,693M placeholder.
• Nscale "acquires" Anyscale. Nscale's own newsroom surfaced today with that headline, but the definitive agreement dates from 30 July and no close has been announced; treat the item as a resurfaced page.
• Salience Labs — $125M Series B led by Bullhound Capital for all-optical circuit switching, a layer this map covers three ways. No post-money anywhere, so it fails the valuation gate. Held off.
• Opaque Systems — Anthropic licensed its confidential-AI technology and hired some of its engineers on 13 October; terms undisclosed, and the "$300M" in the relays is Opaque's February Series B mark, carried by no primary source. A licence-and-hire also matches no relationship type on this map.
• Shield AI's reported $150M X-BAT round (8 October, aggregator only) was searched directly again today and still appears nowhere credible.
• Infinigence AI's RMB2.3B Series C closed on 12 October with no valuation disclosed; today's coverage adds the $344M conversion but still no post-money.

Further reading: TLDR AI · The Rundown · Techmeme

Validator: 211 entities, 402 relations, 0 errors, 0 warnings. Commit: Modal repriced to $15.75B on its closed Series D; Anduril's open tender and Baseten's two-tier Series F recorded as role facts; three new standing lessons; no new entities and no new edges.