AI Shifts: Perplexity-PayPal Partner Up, CoreWeave Commits $23 Billion & More

As the race to stay ahead in the artificial intelligence (AI) era continues gathering steam, companies find themselves investing more money and resources to ensure they’re developing the best and most powerful products and services.

Here’s a compilation of some of the most impactful moves:

Perplexity-PayPal Partnership

AI company Perplexity announced that it has partnered with fintech firm PayPal to power agentic commerce across the Perplexity Pro platform.

The service, which will come to users in the United States in the summer, will allow consumers to check out instantly with PayPal or Venmo when they ask Perplexity to find products, book travel, or buy tickets.

The move will see the integration of PayPal’s commerce solutions directly into Perplexity's chat interface, the expansion of Perplexity’s commerce tools to PayPal’s over 430 million active accounts across around 200 markets, and the use of PayPal's robust fraud detection and data security protocols to facilitate secure transactions.

Furthermore, the entire process—including payment, shipping, tracking, and invoicing—will be handled behind the scenes with PayPal's account linking, secure tokenized wallet, and emerging passkey checkout flows.

“Perplexity wants to have accurate, trustworthy answers wherever people are making decisions. PayPal is a natural partner because we share a vision for how important trust is in the age of AI,” said Aravind Srinivas, Co-founder and CEO of Perplexity.

“This partnership unlocks new possibilities, where conversations now drive commerce,” said Alex Chriss, President and CEO of PayPal. “We're making it easy and secure to shop right in the chat when inspiration strikes. It's a powerful step in making conversational commerce a reality.”

CoreWeave’s $23 Billion Commitment

Having just published its Q1 2025 financial results, AI cloud platform provider CoreWeave said it is planning to spend between $20 billion to $23 billion this year to boost its AI infrastructure and data center capacity.

The move comes as the NVIDIA-backed company looks to meet the growing demand of its customers, which includes Microsoft.

"We've delivered an outstanding start to 2025 on multiple fronts. Our strong first quarter financial performance caps a string of milestones including our IPO, our major strategic deal with OpenAI as well as other customer wins, our acquisition of Weights & Biases and many technical achievements," said Michael Intrator, CoreWeave's co-founder and Chief Executive Officer.

As such, its projected capital expenditure for Q2 2025 is slated between $3 billion and $3.5 billion, a lot higher than its revenue expectation of $1.06 billion to 1.1 billion.

The move also follows the company’s recent acquisition of Weights & Biases, a leading AI developer platform used to train, fine-tune, and manage models, from experimentation to production. The deal strengthens CoreWeave's capabilities to power AI innovation on its AI cloud platform.

The deal was struck in March and reportedly cost CoreWeave $1.7 billion.


From Weave to Wave. 

TensorWave Raises $100 Million

AI and high-performance computing cloud platform provider TensorWave announced that it raised $100 million in a Series A funding round co-led by Magnetar and AMD Ventures, with additional participation from Prosperity7, Maverick Silicon, and Nexus Venture Partners.

The money will be used to meet the demands the company is “hearing and seeing from hyperscalers and enterprise customers,” and accelerate the deployment of the world’s largest liquid-cooled AMD GPU cluster, consisting of 8,192 MI325X GPUs.

“Our belief is simple: specialization wins. We’ve been AMD-native from day one. That depth of focus has let us unlock performance gains across training, fine-tuning, and inference by optimizing every layer of the stack around MI325X,” Darrick Horton, CEO, TensorWave.

As such, TensorWave hasn’t disclosed what the raised funds value the company at.

Other Moves

Databricks, an American software company and leader in the data lakehouse industry, revealed plans to acquire database startup Neon, which sits at a valuation of $1 billion. The idea is to enable the company to strengthen its analytics platform to help businesses easily develop and use AI agents.  

The acquisition is expected to see Neon’s team join Databricks once completed. Database’s customers include names such as Comcast, Rivian, Shell, Block, and over 10,000 other companies. 

It also follows a range of mergers and acquisitions the company has been engaged in.  

AI chip manufacturer AMD announced a new $6 billion stock buyback plan, which would boost its total repurchase authority to around $10 billion.  

The move follows another announcement between the company and HUMAIN, Saudi Arabia’s new AI enterprise, which includes plans to build the world’s most open, scalable, resilient, and cost-efficient AI infrastructure.  

The multi-year collaboration will see the two companies invest $10 billion to deploy up to 500 megawatts of AI compute capacity over the next five years.  

“This is not just another infrastructure play—it’s an open invitation to the world’s innovators,” said Tareq Amin, CEO of HUMAIN. “We are democratizing AI at the compute level, ensuring that access to advanced AI is limited only by imagination, not by infrastructure.” 

“Our investment with HUMAIN is a significant milestone in advancing global AI infrastructure. Together, we are building a globally significant AI platform that delivers performance, openness and reach at unprecedented levels,” said Dr. Lisa Su, Chair and CEO, AMD.  

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