GenAI Daily - January 22, 2026: Anthropic's $25B Round, NVIDIA Baseten Investment, AI Infrastructure Power Crunch

Top Story

Anthropic Prepares Massive $25 Billion Funding Round at $350 Billion Valuation

Sequoia Capital is planning a "big investment" in Anthropic, the artificial intelligence startup behind the chatbot Claude, according to the Financial Times. Anthropic, founded in 2021 by former employees of OpenAI, is aiming to raise at least $25 billion via the funding round in a deal that values the company at $350 billion. GIC, Singapore's sovereign wealth fund, and Coatue Management, are contributing $1.5 billion each, it said.

This would make it one of the largest private funding rounds in AI history, highlighting continued investor appetite for frontier AI companies despite market concerns about returns on investment. The timing comes as Anthropic competes directly with OpenAI for enterprise customers and seeks to maintain its position as a safety-focused alternative to GPT models.

Why it matters: This funding would give Anthropic significant resources to compete with OpenAI's infrastructure investments and accelerate enterprise AI adoption through more reliable, safety-focused models.

Key Developments

NVIDIA Doubles Down on AI Inference Economy with Baseten Investment

Nvidia has joined a new funding round in Baseten, an AI startup focused on running AI models efficiently in production. The investment underscores the rising value of companies focused on "inference" and how it is turning into the center of gravity for real-world AI economics. The investment also signals a shift from the era of training mega-models to the era of serving them at scale, where latency, cost per query, and reliability decide whether AI features actually pencil out for enterprises.

Analysts increasingly expect inference workloads to dominate overall AI compute as more products bake in assistants, copilots, and automation across customer support, sales, analytics, and internal ops.

Impact: This investment signals that 2026's AI winners will be determined by deployment economics, not just model capabilities.

OpenAI Secures Long-Term Renewable Energy Deal Amid Data Center Expansion

OpenAI's push to scale is colliding with a hard constraint: electricity. The company disclosed a renewable energy agreement to secure long-term power as it expands its data center footprint. The deal highlights a reality across the AI stack: compute capacity is now gated by energy availability and grid readiness, not just access to GPUs.

Large model providers are increasingly acting like industrial-scale power buyers, negotiating multi-year arrangements that resemble hyperscalers' playbook. For the broader ecosystem, this matters because energy procurement is becoming a competitive advantage. When AI leaders can guarantee power and uptime, they can sign bigger enterprise contracts, run more inference, and train larger next-gen systems.

Impact: Energy strategy has become a strategic moat in AI infrastructure, potentially determining which companies can scale effectively.

Enterprise AI Projects Stall on Infrastructure Complexity

MIT's widely cited Project NANDA found 95 percent of organizations are seeing zero measurable return from their generative AI investments. Gartner predicted that more than 40 percent of agentic AI projects will be canceled by the end of 2027. Forrester found that 25 percent of planned AI spend would be delayed into 2027, as only 15 percent of AI decision-makers reported an EBITDA lift for their organization.

This sobering data contradicts the hype around enterprise AI adoption, suggesting that implementation challenges and data infrastructure issues are preventing real-world value creation despite massive investments.

Impact: The gap between AI investment and returns is widening, forcing enterprises to focus on infrastructure fundamentals before advanced use cases.

AI Workforce Impact Accelerates, Labor Anxiety Spikes

Kristalina Georgieva, managing director at the International Monetary Fund, said Tuesday that AI is "a major factor for economic growth," in a conversation with CNBC's Karen Tso and Steve Sedgwick at the World Economic Forum's flagship conference in Davos, Switzerland. "We see potential to up of 0.8% boost to growth over the next years, but it is hitting the labor market like a tsunami, and most countries and most businesses are not prepared for it," Georgieva explained.

In fact, employee concerns about job loss due to AI have skyrocketed from 28% in 2024 to 40% in 2026, according to preliminary findings from consultancy firm Mercer's Global Talent Trends 2026 report, which surveyed 12,000 people worldwide.

Impact: AI-driven workforce transformation is accelerating beyond organizational preparation, requiring immediate upskilling and change management strategies.

Product Launches

• Humans& - $480M Seed Round: AI startup founded by veterans from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic, and xAI raised a staggering seed round at $4.48 billion valuation to build "human-centric" AI research lab (TechStartups)
• Falcon-H1R 7B by TII: Compact AI model delivering performance comparable to systems up to seven times its size, scoring 88.1% on AIME-24 math benchmark (AI Apps)
• Snowflake + Google Gemini Integration: Gemini models now integrated into Snowflake's Cortex AI framework, allowing customers to apply Google's models directly to their governed data (MarketingProfs)

Funding & Deals

• Anthropic - $25B Round: Aiming for $350B valuation with participation from Sequoia Capital, GIC ($1.5B), and Coatue Management ($1.5B) - Building safety-focused Claude AI to compete with OpenAI (Bloomberg)
• Humans& - $480M Seed: Founded by AI veterans from major labs, building human-centric AI research platform at $4.48B valuation (TechStartups)
• Cyera - $400M Series F: Data security platform tripled valuation to $9B, led by Blackstone, protecting 20% of Fortune 500 companies (PYMNTS)
• Mal - $230M Seed: Abu Dhabi-based AI-native Islamic digital bank, largest MENA seed round targeting 2 billion Muslim population (TechStartups)
• LMArena - $150M Series A: AI evaluation platform reached $1.7B valuation with 5 million monthly users facilitating 60 million conversations (AI Apps)

Tomorrow's Watch List

• NVIDIA Jensen Huang's planned visit to China in late January to stabilize AI accelerator market access
• Expected enterprise AI infrastructure announcements as power procurement becomes competitive advantage
• Continued agentic AI platform consolidation following MCP standardization efforts

Related reading: Check out this week's Deep Insights analysis for strategic context on these developments.