Three separate billion-dollar checks went into electricity this week. Not one went into AI. AI raised $3.42B across 76 companies — 23.8% of all venture dollars. Energy and power companies raised $3.82B across 13. The biggest AI round on the board was $312M, the smallest weekly high in months. And the 71% drop from last week is not what it looks like: strip last week's two mega-rounds and the underlying market actually went up 6.4%. Nothing broke. The giant just didn't show up.
$3.42B
AI funding this week
$3.82B
energy funding · more than AI
$418.9B
cumulative · 36 weeks
Verified live · grok + web
Every round on this page was read back to the company's own announcement, twice. Confirmed official: OLIX, Mariana Minerals, Xsight Labs, Volta, Horizon3.ai, Simile, HappyRobot, and all four billion-dollar energy rounds. Press only: PaXini Tech, carried by Chinese financial press at ¥1B with no company release. Three labels we corrected: Volta is a seed and Series A combined, not a $300M seed. Xsight Labs never calls its round a Series E. PaXini's is a strategic round, not a Series C. Dollar figures throughout are Crunchbase's, which is what keeps 36 weeks of week-to-week comparison honest, and where the figure and the company disagree we say so rather than quietly picking one.
Analysis 1 · Overview
Of 203 funded companies this week, 76 (37.4%) were AI, taking $3.42B of the $14.38B total (23.8%). Raw, it reads as a collapse — $11.71B last week to $3.42B, down 70.8%. It isn't one. Last week was two mega-rounds: Safe Superintelligence's $5B and Moonshot's $3.5B. Strip those and Week 35 was $3.21B. This week has no giant to strip and came in at $3.42B — up 6.4%. The number of AI companies funded went 86 → 76. The market held. What changed is where the money went: down a layer, into chips and into power.
Analysis 2 · Regional (AI dollars only)
- United States — $2,014.4M (58.97%) · 40 cos. The healthiest spread in weeks — the biggest US round is only 15% of the US total. Volta $300M, Horizon3.ai $250M, Simile $200M, HappyRobot $150M.
- China — $311.8M (9.13%) · 6 cos. Down from 34% last week, exactly as expected: Moonshot's $3.5B was 88% of that number. PaXini $148.1M leads.
- Europe — $410.9M (12.03%) · 7 cos. OLIX's $312M in London is 76% of Europe's week.
- Asia-Pacific (ex-China) — $181.8M (5.32%) · 11 cos. Singapore and Tokyo led, with RoboTruck's $31.8M for autonomous trucking.
- Middle East & Africa — $388.5M (11.37%) · 7 cos. Xsight Labs' $300M is 77% of it. All Israel at the top.
- Latin America — $86.4M (2.53%) · 2 cos. Almost entirely one São Paulo round.
- Rest of World — $22.1M (0.65%) · 3 cos, including Canada's LoopX.
Analysis 3 · Top 5 AI rounds
1. OLIX — $312M
Series B · London · optical AI accelerators
Processors that move data with light instead of electricity. Founded in 2024 by James Dacombe, now 25. Their own announcement makes the power claim directly: their chip delivers "higher output token throughput per watt than general purpose chips," moving data die to die "at ultra low latency and low energy cost." $3.3B valuation. New money from Fundomo, Arm, and Hudson River Trading, with Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings in as an angel.
⚑ The biggest AI round of the week is a company trying to cut the electricity AI burns — the same problem the energy rounds below are answering from the other end.2. Mariana Minerals — $310M
Series B · San Francisco · critical minerals
The second-biggest check filed under artificial intelligence this week went to a mining company. In its own words it is "a software-first, vertically integrated critical minerals company" that "engineers, builds, and operates mines and refineries." It runs Copper One in Utah and Lithium One in Texas. Led by Khosla Ventures at a reported $1.5B valuation, with a16z, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, BHP Ventures and Mitsubishi joining. It is a clean illustration of where AI money lands once you follow it far enough down: not a model, not an app, but the rock the chips are made from.
3. Xsight Labs — $300M
Tel Aviv · data center chips
Chipsets for data centers and automotive. Official company newsroom, July 30, at a $2.8B post-money valuation, led by Fidelity. Their own wording is "more than $300 million." Israel's entire AI week is essentially this one round.
4. Volta — $300M
Seed and Series A combined · Palo Alto · AI infrastructure
Compute capacity, what they call "AI factories." Co-led by a16z and Altimeter at a $2.4B valuation, with NVIDIA and Michael Dell's family office participating. And the round is the smaller half of the announcement. Volta also announced a $10 billion, six-year deal to supply computing capacity to an unnamed frontier AI lab, out of a 133-megawatt data center in Tydal, Norway, run with Bitdeer on NVIDIA's Vera Rubin chips. One deal, bigger than all 76 AI funding rounds on this page combined. Volta never names the customer. Bloomberg reported it is Anthropic, citing people who asked not to be identified; Anthropic declined to comment, so we are not calling it. Norway's draw is cheap hydro power and cold air, which is analysts' reading rather than anything Volta said.
⚑ This is the week's thesis in one line: the money is going to the thing the models run on, and to the electricity that runs it.5. Horizon3.ai — $250M
Series E · San Francisco · autonomous penetration testing
Software that attacks your own network the way a hacker would — continuously, with no human driving it — then hands you the list of what it got through. Official release, above $2B valuation, co-led by NightDragon and NEA. Their own framing for the round: "the AI vs AI cybersecurity era."
Also notable: Simile $200M (a Stanford spinout building AI models that simulate human behavior, so companies can test products on synthetic customers instead of real ones — co-led by Greenoaks and Index at a $2B valuation, five months after a $100M Series A, with CVS Health, Wealthfront and Deloitte as customers) · HappyRobot $150M (AI agents running freight operations for DHL, Kuehne+Nagel and Uber — Prysm Capital and Eurazeo, $1.2B valuation) · PaXini Tech $148.1M (giving robots a sense of touch, Shenzhen — a ¥1B strategic round) · Zenity $115M (security and governance for AI agents; Crunchbase logs $115M, the company's own announcement says $125M led by Norwest) · Obsidian Security $85M · Integrated Biosciences $68.4M (AI for drug discovery) · Oligo Security $60M · Aurelius Systems $40M (autonomous counter-drone lasers).
Analysis 4 · Trends
- Energy out-raised AI — but only one of the four said AI out loud. $3.82B into power against $3.42B into AI. Three billion-dollar rounds: Base Power $1B (home batteries, $13B valuation), Valar Atomics $1B (nuclear microreactors, Sequoia-led, $6B valuation), Commonwealth Fusion $1B (fusion, $4B raised to date), plus Antora Energy $550M (thermal storage). Everyone assumes this is AI money. Here is what the companies actually said. Valar names it: the raise "accelerates manufacturing of standardized nuclear power plants to meet the rapidly growing energy demands of artificial intelligence, industry, and national security." Antora's CEO names data centers but not AI: "From factories to data centers, energy is the bottleneck to industrial growth." Base Power did not say it — its release goes no further than "the U.S. is undergoing a foundational shift in energy demand." Commonwealth Fusion never mentions AI or data centers at all. One out of four. The demand is real; the attribution is mostly ours, not theirs.
- The mega-round vanished. The market did not. Underlying market up 6.4%. Average AI round $44.9M, median $13.0M. Last week two checks were 73% of the week; this week the biggest is 9% of it. This is what a week looks like without a giant sitting on top of it.
- AI security was the most-funded AI sector by company count. 13 companies, $727M. Horizon3.ai $250M, Zenity $115M, Obsidian $85M, Oligo $60M, DataBahn $40M. Two of them are explicitly about AI attacking or defending AI. Second straight week this pattern held.
- Chips and infrastructure took the most dollars. 11 companies, $1.22B — 36% of every AI dollar. Put that next to the energy number and more than half of the serious money this week went to the layer underneath AI rather than to AI itself.
- Seed is still crowded and still cheap. 35 AI seed rounds, $790.5M total, median $6.5M. Seed and Series A together were 64% of every AI company funded but only 32% of the dollars. Third straight week in this shape.
- Physical AI kept pace without a headline round. 13 companies, $594M. PaXini $148.1M (touch), RoboTruck $31.8M (autonomous trucks, Tokyo), Aurelius $40M (counter-drone), Antioch $31.4M (autonomy simulation). No billion-dollar robot this week, but the count didn't drop.