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A courier for German grocery delivery start-up Gorillas, on his way to deliver an order in Berlin on July 8, 2021.
Tobias Schwarz | AFP via Getty Images

LONDON — German food delivery firm Delivery Hero has invested $235 million in Gorillas, an online grocery start-up, as part of a $1 billion funding round.

Gorillas was founded in May 2020 but has grown at a rapid clip as demand for its service, which ships groceries to people’s doors in as little as 10 minutes, took off during the coronavirus pandemic.

It’s one of several European start-ups competing in an increasingly crowded space. Rivals include Turkish company Getir, British firm Zapp and German peer Flink.

Delivery Hero says it led Gorillas’ latest funding round and now holds an 8% stake in the company. Tencent, Coatue, DST and Dragoneer also invested.

Delivery Hero is one of Europe’s biggest online food delivery platforms, competing with the likes of Deliveroo and Just Eat Takeaway.com. It has ambitions of its own to succeed in rapid grocery delivery, having opened several delivery-only “dark stores” in various countries.

Gorillas is now valued at $3.1 billion following the cash injection, a significant step down from the $6 billion market value the firm had reportedly been seeking earlier this year.

The company was also in discussions with American food delivery giant DoorDash on an investment but those talks ultimately fell apart, according to various reports.

Gorillas declined to comment on the reports when asked about them by CNBC.

“Delivery Hero is on a mission to advance quick commerce globally and we see Gorillas as one of the leaders in Europe and the US,” Niklas Östberg, Delivery Hero’s CEO and founder, said in a statement Tuesday.

“The Gorillas team has an exceptional customer focus driving the highest retention rates we have seen in the industry.”

Shares of Delivery Hero were up more than 1% Tuesday morning.

Gorillas says it now has a run rate of $300 million, meaning it expects to make that much revenue on an annual basis. For a company that’s still only a little over a year old, that’s no mean feat.

Still, whether Gorillas can keep up its wild growth as Covid-19 restrictions are rolled back remains to be seen. Meanwhile, the company has also faced anger from delivery couriers protesting unfavorable working conditions.

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Elon Musk’s xAI raises $10 billion in debt and equity as it steps up challenge to OpenAI

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Elon Musk's xAI raises  billion in debt and equity as it steps up challenge to OpenAI

Elon Musk announced his new company xAI, which he says has the goal to understand the true nature of the universe.

Jaap Arriens | Nurphoto | Getty Images

XAI, the artificial intelligence startup run by Elon Musk, raised a combined $10 billion in debt and equity, Morgan Stanley said.

Half of that sum was clinched through secured notes and term loans, while a separate $5 billion was secured through strategic equity investment, the bank said on Monday.

The funding gives xAI more firepower to build out infrastructure and develop its Grok AI chatbot as it looks to compete with bitter rival OpenAI, as well as with a swathe of other players including Amazon-backed Anthropic.

In May, Musk told CNBC that xAI has already installed 200,000 graphics processing units (GPUs) at its Colossus facility in Memphis, Tennessee. Colossus is xAI’s supercomputer that trains the firm’s AI. Musk at the time said that his company will continue buying chips from semiconductor giants Nvidia and AMD and that xAI is planning a 1-million-GPU facility outside of Memphis.

Addressing the latest funds raised by the company, Morgan Stanley that “the proceeds will support xAI’s continued development of cutting-edge AI solutions, including one of the world’s largest data center and its flagship Grok platform.”

xAI continues to release updates to Grok and unveiled the Grok 3 AI model in February. Musk has sought to boost the use of Grok by integrating the AI model with the X social media platform, formerly known as Twitter. In March, xAI acquired X in a deal that valued the site at $33 billion and the AI firm at $80 billion. It’s unclear if the new equity raise has changed that valuation.

xAI was not immediately available for comment.

Last year, xAI raised $6 billion at a valuation of $50 billion, CNBC reported.

Morgan Stanley said the latest debt offering was “oversubscribed and included prominent global debt investors.”

Competition among American AI startups is intensifying, with companies raising huge amounts of funding to buy chips and build infrastructure.

OpenAI in March closed a $40 billion financing round that valued the ChatGPT developer at $300 billion. Its big investors include Microsoft and Japan’s SoftBank.

Anthropic, the developer of the Claude chatbot, closed a funding round in March that valued the firm at $61.5 billion. The company then received a five-year $2.5 billion revolving credit line in May.

Musk has called Grok a “maximally truth-seeking” AI that is also “anti-woke,” in a bid to set it apart from its rivals. But this has not come without its fair share of controversy. Earlier this year, Grok responded to user queries with unrelated comments about the controversial topic of “white genocide” and South Africa.

Musk has also clashed with fellow AI leaders, including OpenAI’s Sam Altman. Most famously, Musk claimed that OpenAI, which he co-founded, has deviated from its original mission of developing AI to benefit humanity as a nonprofit and is instead focused on commercial success. In February, Musk alongside a group of investors, put in a bid of $97.4 billion to buy control of OpenAI. Altman swiftly rejected the offer.

CNBC’s Lora Kolodny and Jonathan Vanian contributed to this report.

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China’s Huawei open-sources AI models as it seeks adoption across the global AI market

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China's Huawei open-sources AI models as it seeks adoption across the global AI market

In recent years, the company has transformed from a competent private sector telecommunications firm into a “muscular technology juggernaut straddling the entire AI hardware and software stack,” said Paul Triolo, partner and senior vice president for China at advisory firm DGA-Albright Stonebridge Group.

Ramon Costa | SOPA Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images

Huawei has open-sourced two of its artificial intelligence models — a move tech experts say will help the U.S.-blacklisted firm continue to build its AI ecosystem and expand overseas. 

The Chinese tech giant announced on Monday the open-sourcing of the AI models under its Pangu series, as well as some of its model reasoning technology.

The moves are in line with other Chinese AI players that continue to push an open-source development strategy. Baidu also open-sourced its large language model series Ernie on Monday. 

Tech experts told CNBC that Huawei’s latest announcements not only highlight how it is solidifying itself as an open-source LLM player, but also how it is strengthening its position across the entire AI value chain as it works to overcome U.S.-led AI chip export restrictions.

In recent years, the company has transformed from a competent private sector telecommunications firm into a “muscular technology juggernaut straddling the entire AI hardware and software stack,” said Paul Triolo, partner and senior vice president for China at advisory firm DGA-Albright Stonebridge Group.

In its announcement Monday, Huawei called the open-source moves another key measure for Huawei’s “Ascend ecosystem strategy” that would help speed up the adoption of AI across “thousands of industries.”

The Ascend ecosystem refers to AI products built around the company’s Ascend AI chip series, which are widely considered to be China’s leading competitor to products from American chip giant Nvidia. Nvidia is restricted from selling its advanced products to China. 

A Google-like strategy?

Pangu being available in an open-source manner allows developers and businesses to test the models and customize them for their needs, said Lian Jye Su, chief analyst at Omdia. “The move is expected to incentivize the use of other Huawei products,” he added.

According to experts, the coupling of Huawei’s Pangu models with the company’s AI chips and related products gives the company a unique advantage, allowing it to optimize its AI solutions and applications. 

While competitors like Baidu have LLMs with broad capabilities, Huawei has focused on specialized AI models for sectors such as government, finance and manufacturing.

“Huawei is not as strong as companies like DeepSeek and Baidu at the overall software level – but it doesn’t need to be,” said Marc Einstein, research director at Counterpoint Research. 

“Its objective is to ultimately use open source products to drive hardware sales, which is a completely different model from others. It also collaborates with DeepSeek, Baidu and others and will continue to do so,” he added. 

Nvidia CEO: Huawei ‘has got China covered’ if the U.S. doesn’t participate

Ray Wang, principal analyst at Constellation Research, said the chip-to-model strategy is similar to that of Google, a company that is also developing AI chips and AI models like its open-source Gemma models.

Huawei’s announcement on Monday could also help with its international ambitions. Huawei, along with players like Zhipu AI, has been slowly making inroads into new overseas markets.

In its announcement Monday, Huawei invited developers, corporate partners and researchers around the world to download and use its new open-source products in order to gather feedback and improve them.

“Huawei’s open-source strategy will resonate well in developing countries where enterprises are more price-sensitive as is the case with [Huawei’s] other products,” Einstein said. 

As part of its global strategy, the company has also been looking to bring its latest AI data center solutions to new countries. 

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As nations build ‘sovereign AI,’ open-source models and cloud computing can help, experts say

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As nations build 'sovereign AI,' open-source models and cloud computing can help, experts say

Digital illustration of a glowing world map with “AI” text across multiple continents, representing the global presence and integration of artificial intelligence.

Fotograzia | Moment | Getty Images

As artificial intelligence becomes more democratized, it is important for emerging economies to build their own “sovereign AI,” panelists told CNBC’s East Tech West conference in Bangkok, Thailand, on Friday.

In general, sovereign AI refers to a nation’s ability to control its own AI technologies, data and related infrastructure, ensuring strategic autonomy while meeting its unique priorities and security needs.

However, this sovereignty has been lacking, according to panelist Kasima Tharnpipitchai, head of AI strategy at SCB 10X, the technology investment arm of Thailand-based SCBX Group. He noted that many of the world’s most prominent large language models, operated by companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI, are based on the English language.

“The way you think, the way you interact with the world, the way you are when you speak another language can be very different,” Tharnpipitchai said. 

It is, therefore, important for countries to take ownership of their AI systems, developing technology for specific languages, cultures, and countries, rather than just translating over English-based models. 

Sovereign AI rises as governments become power brokers

Panelists agreed that the digitally savvy ASEAN region, with a total population of nearly 700 million people, is particularly well positioned to build its sovereign AI. People under the age of 35 make up around 61% of the population, and about 125,000 new users gain access to the internet daily.

Given this context, Jeff Johnson, managing director of ASEAN at Amazon Web Services, said, “I  think it’s really important, and we’re really focused on how we can really democratize access to cloud and AI.”

Open-source models 

According to panelists, one key way that countries can build up their sovereign AI environments is through the use of open-source AI models. 

“There is plenty of amazing talent here in Southeast Asia and in Thailand, especially. To have that captured in a way that isn’t publicly accessible or ecosystem developing would feel like a shame,” said SCB 10X’s Tharnpipitchai. 

Doing open-source is a way to create a “collective energy” to help Thailand better compete in AI and push sovereignty in a way that is beneficial for the entire country, he added. 

Access to computing 

Open-source AI will have a massive impact on the world, says Hugging Face CEO

“We’re here in Thailand and across Southeast Asia to support all industries, all businesses of all shapes and sizes, from the smallest startup to the largest enterprise,” said AWS’s Johnson. 

He added that the economic model of the company’s cloud services makes it easy to “pay for what you use,” thus lowering the barriers to entry and making it very easy to build models and applications. 

In April, the U.N. Trade and Development Agency said in a report that AI was projected to reach $4.8 trillion in market value by 2033. However, it warned that the technology’s benefits remain highly concentrated, with nations at risk of lagging behind. 

Among UNCTAD’s recommendations to the international community for driving inclusive growth was shared AI infrastructure, the use of open-source AI models and initiatives to share AI knowledge and resources.

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