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Race to AGI Daily Digest - Wednesday, December 31, 2025
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TLDR
SoftBank’s $41bn investment gives it an 11% stake in OpenAI, tightening the link between frontier models and SoftBank’s data center plans.
ByteDance’s planned $14bn NVIDIA chip order turns compute access into a multi‑year strategic bet tied directly to export controls.
China’s MIIT is hard-wiring AI and 800G networking into new internet exchange hubs, locking model workloads into national infrastructure.
Insilico Medicine’s record Hong Kong IPO shows AI-first biotech is mature enough to stand on public markets, not just private funding.
Baidu and Intel gained while Tesla, Palantir, and IBM fell, extending a quiet rotation toward infrastructure and China-linked AI plays.
The Full Story
Building on Monday’s Nvidia–Groq licensing deal and Tuesday’s Meta–Manus agents buy, today is about who’s bankrolling the next phase of the race.
Start with the biggest check: SoftBank has completed a $41bn investment in OpenAI, taking its stake to 11% SoftBank–OpenAI deal ->. That’s not just a financial win for a single lab. It locks OpenAI in as a central tenant of SoftBank’s AI data center ambitions SoftBank AI data center strategy -> and gives OpenAI fresh fuel to turn frontier models and agents into actual products OpenAI profile ->.
Following Monday’s focus on high-efficiency inference IP, NVIDIA is back in the spotlight via its customer base. ByteDance plans a $14bn NVIDIA chip buy for 2026, effectively reserving a huge slice of future compute capacity ByteDance chip plan ->. Put that next to US rules that allow H200 exports to China with a 25% fee, and the AI Chip Exports = National Security storyline starts to look like the new normal AI chip export narrative ->. ByteDance isn’t just buying GPUs; it’s buying a geopolitical headache.
China’s MIIT is helping on the home front. Yesterday’s early hints firm up into a clear directive: new internet exchange hubs must be built with AI workloads and 800G networking in mind China MIIT AI+800G push ->. That reinforces Monday’s storyline about the inference hardware arms race shifting from raw chips to full-stack infrastructure.
On a different frontier, Insilico Medicine’s debut on the Hong Kong exchange sets a record for AI-first biotech IPOs Insilico Medicine IPO ->. So while big tech hoards agents and compute, specialized players are proving you can take “AI + domain expertise” all the way to public markets.
Stocks echoed the shift. Baidu jumped more than 4% and Intel climbed again, while Tesla, Palantir, and IBM slipped. Capital is tilting toward core infrastructure and China-exposed AI names Browse AI-exposed companies ->. Put together, the week’s picture is getting clearer: own the agents, own the inference stack, and secure the capital and chips to keep both running at frontier scale.
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