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AI Startup Modular Raises $250 Million to Take On Nvidia’s Software Dominance

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AI startup Modular announced Wednesday it has raised $250 million in fresh funding, giving the company a valuation of $1.6 billion as it looks to loosen Nvidia’s grip on the AI computing ecosystem.

The round, which nearly tripled Modular’s valuation from two years ago, was led by the U.S. Innovative Technology Fund with participation from DFJ Growth and existing backers GV, General Catalyst, and Greylock.

Founded in 2022 by former Apple and Google engineers, Modular has built a platform that lets developers run AI applications across multiple types of chips without rewriting code for each one. Its clients include cloud providers such as Oracle and Amazon, as well as chipmakers Nvidia and AMD.

Nvidia’s dominance—holding more than 80% of the high-end AI chip market—is reinforced by its proprietary CUDA software, which locks in over 4 million developers worldwide. Modular positions itself as a neutral alternative, branding its approach the “Switzerland strategy.”

Co-founder and CEO Chris Lattner emphasized that Modular isn’t aiming to topple Nvidia directly. “What we’re focused on is not like pushing down Nvidia or crushing them. It’s more about enabling a level playing field so that other people can compete,” he said.

The company plans to sell its software directly to enterprises on a usage-based model and through revenue-sharing deals with cloud providers. Investors are betting that a multi-vendor AI hardware future is inevitable. DFJ Growth partner Sam Fort described Modular as “VMware for the AI era,” enabling workloads to move seamlessly across different chip vendors.

With around 130 employees, Modular plans to use the new capital to grow its engineering and sales teams and to expand beyond AI inference into the more demanding AI training market.

Alibaba Shares Surge on Nvidia Partnership and Global AI Expansion

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Alibaba announced on Wednesday a sweeping set of initiatives, including a partnership with Nvidia, new global data centers, and its largest-ever AI products, underscoring its pivot to make artificial intelligence a central business priority alongside e-commerce.

The news sent Alibaba’s Hong Kong-listed shares up nearly 10% to a four-year high, while its U.S.-listed shares also rose by a similar margin in premarket trading.

“The speed of AI industry development has far exceeded our expectations, and the industry’s demand for AI infrastructure has also far exceeded our expectations,” Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu said at the company’s annual Apsara Conference. He added that spending on AI will be increased, though without specifying figures. Earlier this year, Alibaba pledged 380 billion yuan ($53 billion) for AI infrastructure investments over three years.

As part of its strategy, Alibaba will collaborate with Nvidia to enhance physical AI capabilities including data synthesis, model training, environmental simulation, and validation testing.

The company also unveiled an ambitious global data center expansion plan, announcing facilities in Brazil, France, and the Netherlands, with more to follow in Mexico, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, and Dubai within the next year. This will add to Alibaba’s current network of 91 data centers across 29 regions. The company did not specify whether Nvidia chips would power these new facilities.

At the same event, Alibaba launched its most advanced AI language model to date, Qwen3-Max, boasting over 1 trillion parameters. According to CTO Zhou Jingren, the model demonstrates strong performance in code generation and autonomous agent capabilities, allowing the AI to act more independently toward user-defined goals compared to traditional chatbots like ChatGPT.

Benchmark tests such as Tau2-Bench reportedly show Qwen3-Max outperforming competitors including Anthropic’s Claude and DeepSeek-V3.1 in specific categories.

Additional AI products showcased included Qwen3-Omni, a multimodal system designed for immersive applications in virtual and augmented reality, with potential use cases in smart glasses and intelligent vehicle cockpits.

The announcements come shortly after Nvidia revealed a $100 billion investment deal with OpenAI, highlighting the intensifying race in AI infrastructure.

Alibaba’s cloud division, which reported 26% revenue growth last quarter, is emerging as a key growth driver as the company monetizes its AI services more aggressively.

OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank to Build Five New AI Data Centers for $500 Billion Stargate Project

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OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank announced plans to construct five new artificial intelligence data centers in the United States as part of their massive Stargate project, an initiative expected to reshape AI infrastructure.

President Donald Trump hosted leading tech CEOs in January to launch Stargate, a private-sector effort aiming to spend up to $500 billion on the compute power needed to support the next generation of AI.

OpenAI and Oracle will build three new facilities in Shackelford County, Texas, Doña Ana County, New Mexico, and an undisclosed Midwestern site. Together with SoftBank and its affiliate, OpenAI will also develop two additional centers in Lordstown, Ohio, and Milam County, Texas.

These new facilities, combined with Oracle-OpenAI’s Abilene, Texas expansion and ongoing projects with CoreWeave, will boost Stargate’s total data center capacity to nearly 7 gigawatts. According to OpenAI, this represents over $400 billion in investments over the next three years. The ultimate goal remains 10 gigawatts of total capacity.

“AI can only fulfill its promise if we build the compute to power it,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a statement.

The new projects are expected to create 25,000 on-site jobs. The announcement follows Nvidia’s pledge on Monday to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI and supply data center chips.

To finance Stargate, OpenAI and its partners plan to use debt financing and lease chips, according to sources familiar with the matter.

With backing from Microsoft, OpenAI joins other tech giants pouring billions into AI infrastructure to support services such as ChatGPT and Copilot.

Given AI’s growing importance in sensitive fields like defense—and with China racing to catch up—both the private sector and the Trump administration have made AI infrastructure a strategic priority.