Quad countries condemn economic coercion and announce $85 million allocation for AI development

Foreign ministers of the Quad nations expressed serious concern regarding economic coercion, including arbitrary export restrictions and non-market practices that lead to overproduction and disrupt global supply chains in critical sectors. These actions are directed against China's military and economic practices in the Indo-Pacific region.

During the meeting in Atlanta, the Quad countries also announced the provision of over $85 million in technical and financial assistance to expand access to 'Trusted Superintelligence SI' (referring to artificial intelligence) in the Indo-Pacific region. It should be noted that Trump recently signed an executive order changing the name of AI to SI.

The ministers supported continued cooperation in the supply chains of critical minerals and the need to reduce dependence on any single supplier. The Foreign Ministers of Australia, India, Japan, and the US—Penny Wong, S. Jaishankar, Toshimitsu Motegi, and Marco Rubio, respectively—held the fourth Quad foreign ministers' meeting after President Donald Trump's return to the White House last year, on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Atlanta on Saturday.

At this meeting, Motegi voiced strong protest against any unilateral attempts to change the status quo by force or coercion, although the joint Quad statement, unlike the May meeting, refrained from mentioning the South China or East China Sea.

Quad ministers continue to meet despite the leaders' summit remaining frozen, leading to speculation that the Trump administration has effectively downgraded the group's status by not allowing India to participate as planned.

In the joint statement, the ministers reaffirmed their commitment to promoting peace, stability, and prosperity in the Indo-Pacific region, as well as holding the Quad Leaders' Summit. Rubio stated after the meeting that Quad will soon announce a leaders' summit in Manila on the sidelines of ASEAN meetings. President Donald Trump is scheduled to travel to China from Manila to attend the APEC summit.

Leaders also focused on the situation in West Asia, including the Strait of Hormuz. The joint statement emphasized the absolute necessity of protecting and preserving navigation rights and freedoms in the Strait of Hormuz, the Red Sea, and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait in accordance with international law reflected in UNCLOS, recognizing the importance of critical sea routes, uninterrupted trade, energy security, as well as unimpeded passage and safety of maritime crews and vessels without customs duties.

Jaishankar noted that the meeting highlighted the importance of maintaining stability, stimulating prosperity, and ensuring freedom of choice, as well as deepening cooperation to strengthen supply chain resilience and ensure the security of critical minerals and energy technologies. He also mentioned the importance of continuing agreements on counter-terrorism, maritime security, and capacity building to enhance resilience and promote peace and stability.

According to the joint statement, the ministers also announced the first-ever Quad Business Leaders Forum, which will bring together industry leaders, government, and policy experts from Quad countries to strengthen public-private sector ties, including promoting commercial deals in key areas. The statement indicated that the Quad countries reinforced the need to create secure, resilient, and reliable supply chains for advanced semiconductors and SI (AI) equipment.

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business-standard.comOctober 27, 17:17

Simplismart raises $14 million in Series B round to expand AI inference platform

Simplismart, a company specializing in artificial intelligence inference infrastructure, announced that it has raised $14 million in a Series B funding round. The round was led by Dallas Venture Capital, with participation from NVIDIA, Accel, Shastra VC, and Micromax.

The funds raised will be used for the further development of the Simplismart inference platform. This will enable enterprises to launch AI-based applications more efficiently, and cloud providers to transform their Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) infrastructure into managed AI services. Furthermore, the funding will support the expansion of partnerships with cloud providers and sovereign AI, as well as growth in North American and other global markets.

Simplismart creates a software layer situated between AI models and GPU infrastructure. Its modular inference engine allows companies to customize AI model operation according to their needs for speed, cost, and performance. The company's orchestration platform manages deployment and scaling in both cloud and on-premise infrastructure.

Over the last six months, the company's annual revenue growth rate has increased 14fold. Companies such as HeyGen, Higgsfield, InVideo, Shiprocket, Apna, and Ema run production workloads on the Simplismart platform, covering video, voice, multimodal, and enterprise AI applications.

Amritaanshu Jain, Co-founder and CEO of Simplismart, noted that while the industry has spent many years improving AI model capabilities, the advantage is determined by how these models are utilized: the cost per interaction, application response speed, and reliability under increasing demand. He added that the team spent four years creating the software layer between the model and the GPU, helping clients optimize workload deployment and operation.

An example of usage is the Exotel communications platform. After Exotel found that the economics of closed API models were unsuitable for its voice agents, the company fine-tuned an open model on its own data and migrated the inference to Simplismart. By sharding GPUs, Simplismart reduced the cost per minute for Exotel by 57% compared to closed API models. Additionally, it lowered costs below that of self-hosting the same open model and reduced response time from 1.1 seconds to less than 300 milliseconds.

As part of its offering to cloud providers, Simplismart collaborates with NVIDIA to simplify the deployment and operation of AI infrastructure at scale. Unlike inference providers who buy or reserve GPU capacity and resell it, Simplismart itself does not own computing power. Instead, it provides a software layer that transforms third-party GPU clusters into ready-to-use AI production infrastructure. Cloud providers can use this platform to offer managed AI services under their own brands without building their own software stack from scratch. This approach is already used by Yotta, where the Simplismart platform forms the basis of the Shakti Studio server inference layer.

Dayakar Puskoor, Managing Partner at Dallas Venture Capital, stated that inference is becoming one of the most significant drivers of change in the AI economic model. He emphasized that Simplismart is rapidly becoming a global player, helping enterprises execute AI workloads more efficiently and enabling cloud providers to convert GPU power into scalable services.

Devansh Ghatak, Co-founder and CTO of Simplismart, reported that the company's modular inference engine allows configurations to be adapted to the requirements of individual workloads, and the orchestration platform manages deployment across various infrastructure environments. Ghatak also mentioned that the new funding will support the development of a dynamic GPU scheduling layer, which can align AI workloads with available computing power across different regions and time zones, helping cloud providers better utilize their GPU infrastructure.

business-standard.comOctober 26, 19:12

Meta plans to raise a record $95 billion through stock issuance to fund AI infrastructure

Meta Platforms announced on Monday plans to raise up to $95 billion in the largest stock offering in the company's history. This is due to the social network's intensive spending on expanding its artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure.

The company, which is the parent company of Facebook, launched public offerings totaling about $35 billion in common and preferred shares. Additionally, it intends to launch a separate market share sale program worth up to $60 billion.

A larger share sale program will be launched after the trading of new non-voting Class C shares begins, which is expected in the first quarter of 2027, although the company has not yet specified the exact timing and conditions of this sale.

Interest in Funding

Meta's fundraising plan, one of the largest among AI companies, attracted interest from Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices, and Broadcom for a total of up to $5 billion in Class A shares. This interest heightens concerns about the increasingly closed cycle of capital movement in the AI industry, as chip suppliers help finance the development of one of their largest clients.

Experts at William Blair noted that they expect investors to continue questioning the prospects for future capital raising and self-funding. Nevertheless, analysts believe that this financing strengthens Meta's confidence in the long-term return on AI investments and underscores the increasingly capital-intensive nature of pursuing this opportunity.

The company's shares fell by approximately 1.4 percent during morning trading. The latest fundraising campaign further demonstrates a trend among large technology corporations to utilize debt markets and raise equity capital to support their AI infrastructure, unlike the previous reliance on internal cash flow.

Meta's AI Spending

Earlier this year, Alphabet increased the size of its stock issuances to $84.75 billion. Separately, on Monday, it was announced that affiliate Apollo Global Management would acquire AI chips and server equipment to be leased to the aerospace firm Apollo, as part of a deal with total principal payments of about $40 billion.

Meta has committed to spending around $825 billion in the future, with the main driver of these expenses being growing investments in data centers, AI-related infrastructure, and cloud service computing power. However, such rapid expansion has led to the depletion of the company's historically strong free cash flow.

In the third quarter, the company reported a cash burn of $2.12 billion, marking the first negative free cash flow in over a decade, compared to positive cash flow of $10.63 billion the previous year. Nevertheless, the initial popularity of its consumer AI agent Muse and the release of a competitive new series of AI models partially justified Meta's significant investments.

William Blair analysts believe that Meta will ultimately create a profitable AI business, and the long-term return should help the company diversify, although this path may not be linear. According to the latest quarterly report, as of September 30, the company held $82.45 billion in cash, cash equivalents, and securities, while long-term debt stood at $80.92 billion.

Last week, Meta raised the lower bound of its annual capital expenditure forecast to a range of $135 to $145 billion. The company stated that it would issue Class C common stock in January 2027, which would effectively result in a two-to-one stock split, to finance acquisitions and retain key talent while maintaining Mark Zuckerberg's control as CEO.