Siliconangle

• Microsoft has launched a new professional services business specifically focused on artificial intelligence. • The company is backing this strategic expansion with a significant investment of $2.5 billion. • This move allows Microsoft to provide specialized expertise to help clients integrate and scale AI technologies within their organizations.

• Global venture funding reached a record-breaking $510 billion during the first half of the year. • This surge in investment is primarily driven by the accelerating boom in artificial intelligence technologies. • The milestone highlights a massive shift in capital allocation toward AI, signaling strong investor confidence in the sector's long-term scalability.

• Aligned has raised $60 million in a Series B funding round led by PeakSpan Capital, with participation from Hetz Ventures, JAL Ventures, and NFX. • This latest investment brings the company's total funding to date to $73.8 million. • The funds will be used to develop an AI-native collaborative dealmaking platform designed to streamline and organize the often chaotic process of B2B enterprise sales execution.

• Meta shares surged 9% following reports that the company plans to offer AI infrastructure services to external users. • The proposed strategy involves selling computing capacity or providing hosted access to Meta's internally developed large language models. • This move could open the ecosystem for developers to utilize Meta's AI tools, including its flagship LLM, Muse Spark, which launched in April.

• AI tokenization is being utilized to enhance data security by replacing sensitive information with tokens that preserve predictive accuracy. • This innovation allows organizations to leverage high-utility data for AI training and analysis while significantly reducing the risk of data breaches. • The process is critical for balancing the need for large-scale data processing with strict privacy and security requirements.

• Mistral is reportedly seeking a $3.5 billion funding round to support its strategic push into physics-based AI. • The company is expanding its ecosystem with "Studio," an AI agent development platform, alongside AI-optimized cloud infrastructure and custom foundation model tools. • This fundraising effort occurs as major rivals OpenAI and Anthropic prepare for public offerings and Amazon's new venture, Prometheus Inc., enters the market after raising $12 billion this week.