ChangXin Technology invests in two projects, AI's hidden bill tallied at $3 trillion, and Modal Labs close to raising $750 million.
IT Home reported on September 28 that ChangXin Technology issued an evening announcement, planning to invest 24.1 billion yuan and 10.8 billion yuan respectively to build a technology R&D project and phase two of a memory wafer back-end testing base. The money mainly comes from the oversubscribed portion of the company's IPO fundraising. ChangXin makes memory and storage chips — one line handles R&D, the other handles back-end packaging and testing. Back-end testing is the last checkpoint before chips leave the factory; once the base is built, capacity and yield have somewhere to land. Semiconductor expansion costs more money and time than other industries. This one is useful for people watching storage prices. Domestic storage expansion may not hold down chip quotes in the short term, but the supply pie will grow in the medium term. ChangXin's storage base is mainly in Hefei. People building PCs or buying SSDs can keep an eye on where storage prices go next year.
The Daily Telegraph's September 28 report did a full accounting of the AI boom, at roughly $3 trillion. The money is mainly spent on the machines, power, and data centers needed to run AI. The report says this spending doesn't fully show up in the main lines of companies' financial statements. The logic is: training models burns hardware first, and returns depend on revenue materializing years later. Right now chips and data centers are both getting more expensive, while machine depreciation happens ahead of schedule. The report compares this bill with the infrastructure boom built on borrowed money. The bill will trickle down to ordinary people's lives. Data centers use a lot of power, so local electricity prices and public resources tighten first. If you hold AI-related stocks or funds, what this piece reminds you of is whether revenue growth can keep up with depreciation.
TechCrunch cited people familiar with the matter on September 28 saying Modal Labs, which provides runtime environments for large models, is close to completing a $750 million funding round led by Accel, at a post-money valuation of about $15.75 billion. Modal's business is letting developers rent ready-made machines to run models, saving them from buying GPUs and building server rooms themselves. Its valuation rose fast this round, showing the market is still paying a premium for AI's foundational layer. Two groups of people should take note. Those wanting to invest in the AI primary market are looking at the pricing anchor of top infrastructure companies. Developers running their own models can watch its unit prices and available machine rooms — will service fees move along with the valuation?
The Information reported on September 28 that investor Vinod Khosla judged in an interview that by 2030, most robotics startups' valuations will decline. He believes the industry's winners will be highly concentrated, and companies that don't reach the top few will struggle to get follow-on money. Khosla is a veteran Silicon Valley VC, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, and one of OpenAI's early investors. What he said this time runs counter to the robotics hype on the market: humanoid robotics companies are raising one after another. This has direct implications for engineers job-hunting. Robotics startups will stratify next — the top gets money, the middle tier shrinks. When picking an offer, look at the company's orders and mass-production pace, not the demo video at the launch event.
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