Thrive Holdings said on Aug. 12 that it had raised more than $2 billion at a $12 billion valuation, bringing total funding to over $3 billion. The company is not an AI model developer; it buys traditional businesses, including accounting firms and IT services companies, and then embeds AI into core workflows such as tax preparation and technical support. It now owns and operates more than 70 businesses, and OpenAI has taken an equity stake while sending research, product and engineering staff to help with the transformation. The model is increasingly described as an AI-enabled roll-up: instead of selling software to professional services firms, investors buy the firms themselves and then use AI to raise productivity, margins and ultimately valuation. Current, Thrive’s accounting platform, said its Tax AI processed about 7,000 returns this tax season and cut preparation time by 31% at participating firms. Dwelly, a UK property company, has taken a similar path in real estate, while General Catalyst has backed a wider group of companies built around the same idea. The article also warns that the market may be pricing in productivity gains before they are fully proven. Thrive has not disclosed group-level revenue, EBITDA or free cash flow, leaving a wide gap between its $12 billion valuation and the operating metrics the market can already see.

Wall Street is changing how it values listed bitcoin miners that are moving into AI and high-performance computing. The market is shifting away from hash rate, bitcoin output and BTC holdings toward energized megawatts, signed IT load and delivery execution. Core Scientific’s latest quarter shows the new model in action: high-density colocation revenue reached $136.7 million, or about 83% of total revenue, while self-mining revenue fell 66% year over year. TeraWulf and Hut 8 have also signed multibillion-dollar data center leases, but much of that capacity will not be delivered until 2027 or 2028. VanEck says the industry’s biggest challenge is execution, not demand, and estimates a near-term funding gap of about $50 billion across the sector.

A group of publicly listed Bitcoin miners moving into AI and high-performance computing is being judged by a new set of metrics. Investors are no longer focused only on hash rate, Bitcoin production, and BTC held on balance sheets. They are asking how much power a company controls, how much of that capacity is already energized or backed by clear grid interconnection arrangements, how much has been leased to AI customers, and how much is already delivered and billing. The shift is showing up in company results and contract announcements. Core Scientific said its high-density hosting business generated $136.7 million in revenue in the second quarter of 2026, about 83% of total revenue, while self-mining revenue fell roughly 66% year over year to $21.54 million. TeraWulf signed a 20-year data center lease with Anthropic covering about 401 MW of critical IT load and carrying an expected value of about $19 billion, while Hut 8 announced an additional 352 MW lease in Texas valued at $9.8 billion. The opportunity is large, but delivery remains limited. Based on data through June 4, 2026, VanEck estimated that the companies involved had delivered only about 25% of their leased capacity and faced a near-term funding gap of about $50 billion. In this market, the most valuable asset is not planned gigawatts on paper, but power that can be energized on time, financed, built into high-density data centers, and rented under long-term contracts by reliable customers.

Anthropic has signed a 20-year AI data center compute hosting agreement with Riot Platforms worth $9.1 billion, according to Bloomberg. Riot said it will provide 191 megawatts of capacity for Anthropic’s growing Claude workloads, with the first 96 megawatts expected to come online in December next year and full deployment scheduled for June 2028, based on SEC filings. The news sent Riot shares up more than 25% in after-hours trading. The deal highlights how listed bitcoin miners are being pulled into the AI infrastructure buildout as large model developers look beyond traditional cloud providers and move to lock in long-term power, land and compute capacity. The article says Anthropic has been assembling that network through long-dated build-to-suit agreements, alongside partnerships involving AWS, Google Cloud, TeraWulf, Volta Infra Holdings, xAI, Hut 8 and Fluidstack. PANews argues Riot won the contract because of three factors already in place: energized power access at its Rockdale, Texas site; execution capability shown in its earlier data center work with AMD; and a balance sheet that includes more than $1.2 billion in liquid assets, about $549 million in cash, 11,380 BTC and a $573 million transitional financing agreement with Morgan Stanley. The report says the transaction may push investors to value some miners less like high-beta crypto proxies and more like infrastructure operators with long-term contracted cash flow.

Market attention this week stayed fixed on AI compute, cloud order visibility and embodied intelligence themes, according to BlockBeats. CoreWeave and Nebius led the list of the five most-watched stocks after posting strong quarterly numbers and improved order expectations. CoreWeave rose about 20.41% for the week as its second-quarter revenue reached $2.58 billion, nearly doubling year over year, while backlog expanded to $104 billion. Nebius gained about 34.20% after reporting $582.3 million in Q2 revenue, up 454% from a year earlier, and adjusted EBITDA of $236.2 million, alongside higher targets for AI cloud orders and power capacity. SanDisk also drew renewed investor interest after setting medium- to high-double-digit revenue growth targets for FY28 to FY30 and gross margin near 80% at its investor day, helping the stock rise about 16% in a single session. Outside the listed AI names, SpaceX remained in focus ahead of its second share unlock next week, while Unitree’s STAR Market IPO subscription results were released on Aug. 14, with fundraising of about 4.202 billion yuan and a valuation above 40 billion yuan.

PANews’ daily roundup on Aug. 14 collected a wide spread of crypto, AI, regulatory and market developments, led by Databricks closing a $5 billion strategic financing and DeepSeek opening global testing for the developer preview of DeepSeek Harness v0.1 under the MIT license. The report also said Tether completed its first full independent financial statement audit, receiving an unqualified opinion from KPMG U.S. for Tether International, S.A. de C.V.’s 2025 accounts. In U.S. regulation, JPMorgan was reported to have ended its banking relationship with Polymarket last year over regulatory concerns, while the CFTC scheduled its Innovation Advisory Committee’s first meeting for Aug. 20 to discuss crypto assets, AI and prediction market oversight. The project and corporate section included Binance Alpha’s planned Aug. 14 listing of KiiChain (KII), SharpLink staking $200 million in ETH through Lido, and DeepSeek’s API price update that will take effect on Aug. 17. The funding and market data portion covered Kalshi’s talks for a new $750 million round at a $40 billion valuation, AMD’s potential bond sale of up to $5 billion, Bitcoin spot ETF net outflows of $131 million on Aug. 13, Reddit’s upcoming addition to the S&P 500, several crypto company earnings releases, and whale address activity tracked on-chain.

A dense 24-hour news cycle brought fresh filings, earnings, market calls and regulatory signals across crypto and adjacent tech markets. Fidelity filed an amended registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Aug. 11 to add ETH staking to its spot Ethereum ETF, the Fidelity Ethereum Fund (FETH). Under normal conditions, the fund said it could stake as much as 100% of the ETH it holds, with no minimum staking threshold, and its investment objective would change to include staking rewards if approved. Elsewhere, some existing Anthropic investors said the AI company could be valued at more than $2 trillion if it goes public as early as October, with one investor putting the upside case at $3 trillion based on a roughly 30x revenue multiple. The estimates remain investor forecasts, and several investors said Anthropic management has not set an IPO valuation target. The session also featured quarterly updates from Bullish, BitGo and Securitize, new SEC steps around tokenized fund operations and tokenized equities, ETF flow data for Bitcoin and Ethereum products, and a series of policy, infrastructure and security developments spanning Europe, the U.K., Brazil and the U.S.

Second-quarter earnings from listed crypto mining companies showed a widening gap between firms still relying on Bitcoin mining and those already booking meaningful revenue from AI and high-density data center operations. MARA posted a $611.3 million net loss, including a $343 million unrealized fair-value loss on Bitcoin, even as its quarterly production edged up to 2,422 BTC. Riot Platforms mined more Bitcoin as well, yet its mining revenue fell as the average Bitcoin price declined and network hashrate increased. At the same time, Core Scientific and TeraWulf reported that hosting and HPC leasing had become major contributors to current revenue rather than distant promises. Core Scientific generated $136.7 million in high-density hosting revenue, up from $10.6 million a year earlier, while TeraWulf said HPC leasing made up about 71% of its quarterly revenue. The results also show why headline contract values can mislead. Multi-billion-dollar agreements signed by miners are not the same as revenue already recognized in quarterly statements. What matters now is how much capacity has been delivered, how much rent is being booked, and whether those new businesses can cover construction, depreciation and financing costs.