Global venture capital funding reached a record $189 billion in February 2026, with AI startups securing $171 billion, or approximately 90% of the total. This unprecedented inflow was primarily driven by a handful of mega-deals.

Specifically, OpenAI raised $110 billion, Anthropic secured $30 billion, and Waymo garnered $16 billion, with these three companies alone accounting for 83% of the total investment. This concentration of capital highlights a 'winner-takes-most' dynamic in the AI sector and a shift in investor confidence towards AI infrastructure.

Startups outside the AI domain are facing the toughest funding environment in years, as capital increasingly funnels into Large Language Models (LLMs), autonomous systems, and AI infrastructure. The amount raised by these three companies in a single month is equivalent to about one-third of the total global venture investment in 2025, which stood at $425 billion.

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Apple has unveiled its most advanced chips for pro laptops, the M5 Pro and M5 Max. These chips leverage a new Apple-designed Fusion Architecture, integrating two dies into a single System on a Chip (SoC) to deliver significant performance enhancements.

The M5 Pro and M5 Max feature a new 18-core CPU architecture, including six of the world's fastest CPU cores, now called super cores, alongside 12 new performance cores. Their next-generation GPUs incorporate Neural Accelerators in each core, boosting AI compute performance by over 4x compared to the previous generation.

Notably, the M5 Max supports up to 128GB of unified memory with up to 614GB/s bandwidth, enabling incredible results for complex scenes, massive datasets, and higher token generation for LLMs. These chips also include a faster 16-core Neural Engine to accelerate on-device AI features and Apple Intelligence, facilitating faster agentic coding in applications like Xcode.

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Germany has officially entered the race to build the world's first commercial fusion plant, with Munich-based Proxima Fusion partnering with the Free State of Bavaria, energy company RWE, and the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP). Their goal is to bring an operational fusion plant, named Stellaris, to the European grid by the 2030s.

Stellaris is slated to be the first stellarator fusion power plant of its kind to generate net energy gain for both commercial and research purposes. Markus Söder, Minister-President of Bavaria, highlighted fusion's potential to meet the exponential growth in power demand driven by electric mobility, AI, and data centers.

Nuclear fusion, which produces no greenhouse gases or long-lived radioactive waste, is considered the ultimate goal for sustainable nuclear power. This move by Germany intensifies the global competition, with other nations like the United States also pursuing commercial fusion plants through companies such as Helion and Type One Energy.

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