AI Industry Week: Alphabet’s $40B Anthropic Investment, Nvidia’s Open‑Source Multimodal Model, and Major Cloud Earnings

In the past week the AI sector reached a key commercialization milestone as the four major tech giants released earnings that showed explosive growth in AI‑driven cloud and enterprise services, while the industry landscape shifted dramatically.

Alphabet (April 25) announced a total investment of up to $40 billion in Anthropic, including an initial $10 billion cash payment that values Anthropic at $350 billion; the remaining $30 billion will be paid in milestones, and Google Cloud pledged 5 GW of compute capacity for Anthropic over the next five years. Source: Bloomberg.

OpenAI and Microsoft (April 27) jointly disclosed a revision of their partnership: Azure will no longer be the exclusive cloud for OpenAI, allowing OpenAI to expose all products to any cloud provider, while Microsoft retains “first‑release priority” for new OpenAI offerings. Source: Ti Media.

China’s Cyberspace Administration (April 28) issued a notice ordering the shutdown of the “Jianying”, “MaoXiang” apps and the “JiMeng AI” website for failing to comply with regulations requiring labeling of AI‑generated synthetic content. Source: People’s Daily.

Amazon Web Services (April 28) announced at its San Francisco launch that OpenAI’s latest large models, including GPT‑5.4 and GPT‑5.5, are now available on Amazon Bedrock in limited preview, together with a Codex code‑agent and an OpenAI‑powered Bedrock hosted agent. Source: China Economic News.

Nvidia (April 28) released the open‑source multimodal inference model Nemotron 3 Nano Omni, a 30‑billion‑parameter model that supports up to one‑million‑token context windows and claims up to a 9× inference speed improvement; the model is aimed at enterprise AI agents and has already been adopted by Foxconn and Palantir. Source: Securities Times.

National Development and Reform Commission (April 29) announced that the foreign‑investment security review office has prohibited Meta from acquiring the China‑origin AI project “Manus”, ordering the reversal of a completed $20 billion transaction – the first such ban on a foreign AI acquisition in China. Source: NetEase.

OpenAI (April 28) projected that its cheaper, ad‑supported subscription tier will attract new users, while the premium ChatGPT Plus plan is expected to lose 80 % of its current 9 million subscribers this year; advertising revenue is forecast to become its largest single source by 2030, generating about $102 billion. Source: Sohu.

Apple (April 28) outlined a plan to develop a new tool suite for iOS 27 powered by Apple Intelligence, leveraging on‑device AI models to extend, enhance and re‑compose images within seconds, aiming to narrow the imaging gap with Android devices. Source: Sohu.

Tencent Hunyuan (April 29) reported that its new Hy3 preview model topped the OpenRouter global large‑model API call rankings (overall first, tools first, programming second), indicating rising competitiveness of domestic models in the developer ecosystem. Source: Daily Economic News / Tencent News.

DeepSeek (April 29) announced that its “image‑recognition mode” has entered gray‑scale internal testing, allowing a subset of users to experience multimodal interaction, marking the company’s shift from pure text to multimodal AI. Source: Sohu.

SoftBank (April 30) sought a $40 billion loan to fund an investment in OpenAI, drawing additional banks into the financing round and underscoring continued acceleration of global capital into the AI sector. Source: 36Kr.

Cambricon (April 30) reported first‑quarter revenue up 160 % year‑over‑year to ¥2.89 billion and net profit up 185 % to ¥1.0 billion, achieving profitability; comparable domestic competitor MetaX posted 75 % revenue growth to ¥5.62 billion, reflecting rapid expansion of demand for Chinese AI chips. Source: CCDI.

Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta (April 30) simultaneously released their Q1 2026 earnings: Google Cloud revenue reached $20 billion (+63 % YoY), Microsoft AI revenue hit $37 billion (+123 % YoY), Amazon AWS grew 28 % YoY, and Meta’s revenue rose 33 %; combined capital‑expenditure guidance for 2026 approaches $700 billion. Source: Beijing Daily.