Happy Thursday!

NVIDIA just posted its best quarter ever, and the stock dropped. Meta committed up to $100 billion to AMD. And Finland’s IQM is about to become the first European quantum company on a U.S. stock exchange.

Funding News: Over $1.1B raised for AI chip startups in a single day, plus fresh rounds across edge AI, compute orchestration, and quantum hardware

Bonus: Why $1.1 billion in AI chip funding on one day signals the end of GPU monoculture

NVIDIA delivered a blowout Q4: $68.1 billion in revenue (up 73% year-over-year), with data center revenue reaching $62.3 billion. Q1 guidance of $78 billion crushed consensus by roughly $5 billion. Notably, Nvidia assumed zero revenue from China data center compute in its guidance and still beat estimates.

The market’s response? A 5.6% drop, erasing roughly $260 billion in market cap, the worst post-earnings session in ten months. This seems part of a broader rotation out of mega-cap tech, which amplified the selloff.

On the product side, NVIDIA confirmed that the first Vera Rubin GPU samples have shipped to customers, pairing an 88-core Arm-based Vera CPU with Rubin GPUs that each carry 288 GB of HBM4. Production is on track for H2 2026.

Meanwhile, TrendForce reports the next-gen Feynman architecture will be fabricated on TSMC’s A16 node, with Samsung and SK Hynix set to showcase HBM4 at GTC 2026 (March 16–19).

Meta announced a multi-year agreement to deploy up to 6 gigawatts of AMD Instinct GPUs, potentially worth over $100 billion. That makes it the largest single AI chip commitment to a non-NVIDIA supplier. AMD issued Meta performance-based warrants for up to 160 million shares, roughly 10% of the company.

The deal mirrors AMD’s earlier OpenAI warrant structure and came just days after Meta’s expanded commitment to NVIDIA. Shipments of custom MI450 GPUs begin H2 2026. Meta has pledged $135 billion in capex for 2026 and $600 billion in U.S. data centers.

What makes this deal structurally significant is the warrants. They transform a supplier-customer relationship into a strategic partnership, giving Meta direct upside in AMD’s success. If this model spreads (and OpenAI has already adopted it), chip procurement will start looking less like purchasing and more like venture investing.

Finland-based IQM Quantum Computers announced a definitive merger with Nasdaq-listed RAAQ (Real Asset Acquisition Corp), valuing IQM at $1.8 billion pre-money. IQM will become the first European quantum computing company to go public on a U.S. exchange.

The company expects more than $450 million in cash at closing, combining $175 million from the SPAC trust, a $134 million PIPE, and existing reserves. IQM has sold 21 quantum systems to 13 customers across 14 countries, generating approximately $35 million in revenue in 2025. Transaction close is expected around June 2026.

IQM joins an accelerating quantum IPO wave: Infleqtion listed on NYSE as INFQ in February, SEEQC announced its own SPAC, and Xanadu plans to list by the end of March.

A historic week for AI chip funding, with three startups raising a combined $1.1B+ on the same day (February 24). Edge AI, compute orchestration, and quantum hardware also drew capital.

Three AI chip startups raised a combined $1.1 billion on February 24, each targeting a different layer of the compute stack: MatX for training, SambaNova for inference, and Axelera for edge.

MatX ($500M, led by Jane Street and Leopold Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness fund) is building custom training ASICs, claiming 10× GPU throughput for large language models.

SambaNova ($350M, led by Vista Equity Partners) unveiled its SN50 inference chip, claiming 5× Blackwell performance at a third of the cost, and signed Intel as both investor and manufacturing partner after acquisition talks at ~$1.6B reportedly fell through.

Axelera AI ($250M, backed by BlackRock and Samsung Catalyst) raised the largest-ever round for a European AI chip company, targeting edge inference with 500+ customers already deployed.

The pattern is clear: the AI compute market is unbundling into specialized domains (training, inference, edge), each with distinct hardware requirements and economic models.

And the investors aren’t just VCs anymore. Intel, Marvell, BlackRock, and Samsung are placing strategic bets. Meta’s $100B AMD deal and its 160-million-share warrant structure suggest even customers are diversifying their chip exposure like a portfolio.

This is also why NVIDIA acquired Groq for $20B late last year. It was the clearest admission that even the dominant player isn’t certain GPUs are the answer to everything—inference requires different chips than training.