Meta Signs Massive Nvidia Chip Deal, Anthropic Drops Claude Sonnet 4.6, & Fei-Fei Li Raises $1B.
This Week in AI Newsletter: 2/18/2026
Meta struck a sweeping deal with Nvidia to purchase millions of current and next-generation AI chips, as part of Meta’s plan to spend up to $135 billion on AI infrastructure this year. More here.
World Labs, the spatial intelligence startup founded by "godmother of AI" Fei-Fei Li, raised $1 billion from investors including Nvidia, AMD, and Autodesk at a reported $5 billion valuation. More here.
Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 4.6, its second major model launch in under two weeks, offering near-Opus-level performance at a fraction of the cost with improved computer use, coding, and data processing capabilities. More here.
Apple is accelerating work on three AI-powered wearable devices: smart glasses, a pendant, and camera-equipped AirPods, all designed to connect to iPhone with enhanced Siri integration. More here. (Image is a rendering)
Alibaba released Qwen3.5, its newest open-weight AI model series with native multimodal capabilities and agentic coding support, intensifying competition in China’s AI space just a week after launching an AI model for robotics. More here.
A federal court blocking OpenAI from using the term “Cameo” or any similar branding in its Sora video generation tool, handing the celebrity video platform a significant trademark victory. More here.
Ricursive Intelligence, an AI chip design startup, raised $335 million at a $4 billion valuation in just four months, building a platform where AI essentially designs its own computer chips. More here.
Cloud startup Render raised $100 million at a $1.5 billion valuation, capitalizing on the boom in AI-built applications, with OpenAI’s Codex among the platforms deploying web apps on its infrastructure. More here.
Samsung teased new AI photography features for the Galaxy S26, including tools that transform photos from day to night, restore missing objects, and merge multiple shots, all powered by on-device Galaxy AI. More here.
Mistral AI CEO Arthur Mensch said more than 50% of current enterprise software could be replaced by AI. More here.