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Jan 16, 2026
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TGIF! Two more staffers leave Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab. BlackRock raises $12.5 billion for its AI investment partnership with Microsoft and MGX. Amazon Web Services signs a deal with mining giant Rio Tinto.
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Lia Guy and Ian O’Connell, members of technical staff at Thinking Machines Lab, which is led by former OpenAI Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati, are departing the company, according to a person with knowledge of the departures. Guy, who focuses on AI model research, will be returning to OpenAI, where she previously worked before joining Thinking Machines, the person said. O’Connell’s next move couldn’t be learned. He works in infrastructure engineering. The moves come a day after Thinking Machines Chief Technology Officer Barret Zoph and two other senior AI research staffers, Luke Metz and Sam Schoenholz, agreed to return to OpenAI, where they had worked together before leaving about a year ago to help establish Thinking Machines. Before the departures, Thinking Machines had more than 40 staffers. Spokespeople from OpenAI and Thinking Machines declined to comment. Guy and O’Connell didn’t respond to a request for comment. At the end of last year, Thinking Machines was in talks to raise between $4 billion and $5 billion in new funding at a valuation of at least $50 billion. It previously raised $2 billion at a $10 billion pre-investment valuation.
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BlackRock raised $12.5 billion for the AI investment partnership it formed in 2024 with Microsoft and United Arab Emirates-backed MGX, giving it more firepower to invest in data centers and energy resources. Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, said Thursday it raised the money from the founders of the partnership, Global AI Infrastructure Investment Partnership, and outside investors. The partnership is aiming to invest $30 billion in equity and as much as $100 billion when including debt. The partnership last year invested in a $40 billion consortium deal to acquire Aligned Data Centers that’s expected to close in the first half of this year. MGX, which made an additional investment as part of the consortium, will be Aligned’s largest shareholder following the sale, The Information reported.
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Amazon Web Services has inked a deal with Rio Tinto to become the first buyer of copper that the mining giant is producing using a new mining technology. As part of the two-year supply deal, Rio Tinto will use AWS’ cloud and analytics services. The copper will come from an Arizona mine where Rio Tinto is using bioleaching technology to extract copper from deposits that previously were too expensive to process. The announcement comes as Amazon and other big tech companies rush to secure raw materials, power and other supplies needed to build and run data centers. The price of copper, which is used in wiring and other applications inside data centers, hit a record high earlier this month.
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Kuaishou Technology, which competes with ByteDance in China, on Friday announced a bond sale of $2 billion, in a move that could enable it to ramp up its AI investments. Hong Kong-listed Kuaishou is issuing $1.5 billion in U.S.-dollar denominated notes and about $500 million in offshore yuan notes, according to the company’s filings. Kuaishou, operates a popular short-video app and also develops its own AI video generation models known as Kling. The bond fundraising comes as Kling faces fierce competition in the AI video sector from Google and ByteDance as well as upstart Chinese firms like MiniMax and PixVerse. Last month, Kuaishou launched a new AI video model called O1, which not only creates videos but also offers various editing capabilities, such as
modifying the background, adding and removing objects, or turning real-life videos into animation.
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