Feb 7, 2026 · 24-Hour AI Briefing: Anthropic Eyes a Record Raise, NVIDIA Pushes SiPho for 1.6T, Sony Tries to “Industrialize” Game-Making with AI
Over the last 24 hours, three themes tightened: frontier labs are using capital + supply chain to secure long-term positioning; 1.6T optics is becoming as strategic as GPUs; and creative industries are testing whether AI can be a controllable productivity layer without poisoning the ecosystem.
1. Anthropic is raising a new round, targeting $20B+; Coatue, GIC, and Iconiq reportedly commit $1B+ each, plus up to $15B combined from strategic investors NVIDIA and Microsoft
Commentary:
Anthropic originally aimed for $10B, but investor demand appears to have pushed expectations toward $25B+, potentially the largest single fundraising in AI history. NVIDIA and Microsoft form the strategic backbone of the round.
Third-party data suggests Anthropic holds ~42% share in the developer coding market, well ahead of OpenAI’s ~21%. Claude—especially Sonnet 4.5 and Opus 4.5—has built a reputation for reliability and efficiency in high-value workflows (finance, legal, programming), which maps cleanly to enterprise buying behavior.
If the scale and lineup are accurate, this is Anthropic trying to lock a first-tier seat using “capital + supply chain.” The real question: does the money translate into deliverable compute, controllable inference costs, and durable, reusable enterprise revenue?
2. Tower Semiconductor partners with NVIDIA to use high-performance silicon photonics to expand AI infrastructure, enabling 1.6T datacenter optical modules
Commentary:
The core play is Tower’s SiPho platform delivering high-speed, low-power, manufacturable optical interconnects for NVIDIA’s networking stack.
At hyperscale training and inference, networking is increasingly the utilization ceiling. NVIDIA is no longer “selling GPUs”—it’s selling an AI factory (GPU + networking + switching + software). In the 1.6T era, optics supply and performance directly cap cluster scalability, throughput, and tail latency.
This partnership is driven by physics and production reality: winners won’t just have the best GPUs—they’ll push bandwidth and power walls together. Tower + NVIDIA is a move to pre-position in the next-gen optical interconnect supply chain. Who is the next “Tower” to emerge?
3. Sony plans to broadly use AI in future game development, positioning AI as a productivity tool—not a threat to creators
Commentary:
Sony’s framing is a dual message: AI enters the pipeline, but creative control stays human. The open question is whether the market—and creators—buy that distinction.
Practically, Sony is already embedding AI across the pipeline: player-behavior analysis to refine design, automated testing to accelerate bug discovery, generative AI to draft art/text, and LLM-driven character-like experiences.
AI can meaningfully raise productivity, but the downside is visible: flooding the market with low-quality, mass-generated content that crowds out indie developers. The key test is whether Sony can build a controllable, quality-preserving production pipeline rather than an efficiency engine that degrades the ecosystem.
Most important AI events in the last 72 hours:
Capital, optics, and creative pipelines are converging into a system-level competition. The next phase won’t be decided by model quality alone—it’ll be decided by who can industrialize supply, cost, and ecosystem governance into repeatable execution.