OpenAI $30B at $1.25T, DeepSeek grabs $15B — AI News Oct 23

<p>- OpenAI is raising $30B at a $1.25T valuation led by Coatue and UAE investors, with a separate compute-capacity deal bundled into the round; the company plans $600B in compute spend by 2030.</p><p>- DeepSeek raised $15B led by Tencent and CATL, 48 hours after Washington ordered federal agencies to remove its products; Beijing approved DeepSeek and MiniMax models for global use.</p><p>- Meta posted $34.9B in quarterly capex with negative free cash flow; Anthropic's public S-1 is reportedly imminent with a $1.5-2T IPO target.</p><p>- The practitioner take: the price you pay per million tokens is a derivative of these cap tables — inference pricing is the real story.</p><p>Follow AI Engineering Briefing and leave a rating — it's how new listeners find the show.</p>