T. Rowe Price

Meta's AI capacity: what to sell vs. keep

On its July earnings call, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg described a trade-off between monetizing excess AI compute capacity now and preserving capacity to develop future AI models and services. Meta is considering leasing or selling compute — and potentially launching a cloud business — as demand for compute outstrips supply. CNBC reported Anthropic is in preliminary talks to lease capacity from Meta. Meta raised the low end of its 2026 capital expenditure guidance by $5 billion to a range of $130 billion–$145 billion; the company said free cash flow fell about 90% year-over-year. Meta is rolling out new models under AI chief Alexandr Wang (including Muse Spark 1.1) while also preparing to build enterprise sales capabilities and hiring executives such as former AWS leader Dave Brown.

SambaNova Valued at $11B After $1B Funding

SambaNova, an AI chip startup focused on inference hardware and on-premise deployments, raised $1 billion in a funding round that values the company at $11 billion. The round was led by General Atlantic with participation from Seligman Ventures, T. Rowe Price and Capital Group. The company previously raised over $350 million earlier this year from investors including Intel and has a partnership with Intel. SambaNova sells its SN50 chip as part of server units for data centers and emphasizes on-prem inference for security and performance; JPMorgan Chase said it will deploy SambaNova systems for its enterprise AI workloads. CEO Rodrigo Liang said the company is strongly considering an IPO in 2027 (likely in the U.S.).

Bending Spoons IPO Surges 40% on Market Debut

Bending Spoons, a 13-year-old Milan-based company that acquires and revitalizes once-popular tech brands, saw its shares jump nearly 40% on their first trading day, closing at $40.50 vs. a $29 IPO price. The listing values the firm at about $25.7 billion — more than double its last private valuation of $11 billion — after raising $1.68 billion. Disclosed financials show a rapid turnaround: Q1 revenue of $601 million and $27.4 million net income, versus a year-ago $112 million net loss on $259 million revenue. The company generates the majority of revenue from subscriptions (84% last year) and holds well-known assets such as AOL, Eventbrite, Evernote, Meetup and Vimeo. Major outside shareholders before the IPO included Baillie Gifford and several institutional investors.