Welcome to the newest edition of ID Tech’s AI Update. Here’s the latest big news on the shifting landscape of AI and identity technology:
Reflection AI has closed a $2 billion funding round led by Nvidia that valued the firm at about $8 billion. Reflection says it’s building “frontier open intelligence”, and is widely seen as one of the major Western startups working on open source AI along the lines of China’s DeepSeek. Reflection is focused on developing agentic “co-workers” focused on coding tasks. Other participants in the funding round included Eric Schmidt, Citi, 1789 Capital, and existing backers Lightspeed and Sequoia.
SoftBank has signed a definitive agreement to buy ABB’s Robotics division for about $5.4 billion. It’s one of the world’s leading portfolios of industrial robotics – those mechanic arms that are installed in various factory floors, and soon it will be under the umbrella of one of the major backers of AI technology. SoftBank already controls the AI chip designer Arm, and so ABB’s Robotics tech will add serious hardware to its toolkit.
Figure has unveiled its newest humanoid robot with a video showing it perform a range of household tasks, from folding laundry to loading a dishwasher. Figure 03 features custom tactile fingertip sensors that can detect items as small and light as a paperclip, and wireless inductive chargers on its feet, allowing it to step onto a charging dock when not in use. Figure says the robot is ready for high-volume production, but hasn’t announced a launch date or pricing.
OpenAI and AMD have entered into a multi-year chip supply partnership with a novel equity structure. Their aim is to deploy 6 gigawatts of AMD Instinct GPUs, starting with 1 GW in the second half of next year using the MI450 series. That’s enormously ambitious, pointing to tens of thousands of frontier-class GPUs per GW when the project is fully built out. So the deal links payment to gigawatts; OpenAI has the right to buy up to a 10 percent stake in AMD as certain milestones are met, and those milestones are reportedly measured in actual compute.
xAI and Nvidia are also getting creative in financing their own compute deal. Elon Musk’s AI startup is looking to raise $20 billion in financing through a Special-Purpose Vehicle (SPV) that will buy Nvidia GPUs and lease them to xAI on a 5-year term, with Nvidia potentially investing up to $2 billion in the equity piece. The unusual structure is meant to keep debt off of xAI’s books while allowing Nvidia to underwrite demand for its own chips. The overall aim is to get compute for Colossus 2, xAI’s huge data center project in Memphis.
Google says it will invest €5 billion into Belgium over the course of 2026-2027 as it builds out its AI and cloud infrastructure. The planned expansion will build on its Saint-Ghislain data center campus, and also involves deals with Eneco, Luminus, and Renner to help add onshore wind to Belgium’s grid, supporting Google’s target for carbon-free energy. The announcement came during a Belgian economic mission to California, and authorities say it will add about 300 jobs plus broader indirect employment via suppliers.
The consulting firm Deloitte is giving the Australian government a partial refund for a report that featured AI-generated hallucinations. The A$440,000 consultancy report was meant to deliver to the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations (DEWR) a review of welfare-compliance processes and related IT systems. Human reviewers ultimately found that it had made-up citations and misattributed quotes. DEWR says its core findings still stand, but is accepting a refund of A$98,000.
The chatbot’s take: For what it’s worth, GPT-5 doesn’t use the word “bubble” here.
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By Alex Perala
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