3 Billion IPhones Sold!!

Nothing announces that a business is successful like counting your products sales in 9 zeros. Apple announced few days ago to have sold 3 billion IPhones. THAT IS ALOT OF IPHONE! It is no surprise that they also announced to have hit a new peak in company’s valuation. Speaking of announcement, there were a lot of those this week, and it was funds!! As usual, we brought you all the details

OpenAI just pulled in another mountain of cash,$8.3 billion, pushing its value to about $300 billion. Investors rushed to grab a piece of the ChatGPT maker months earlier than anyone expected, because the company had said it would look for this money closer to the end of the year.

This new cash is only one slice of a much bigger goal. OpenAI aims to raise a total of $40 billion in 2025, and it already picked up $2.5 billion back in March. The speed of today’s deal shows how eager big funds are to back anything tied to leading-edge AI. OpenAI’s numbers are climbing fast. Reports say yearly revenue has raced past $13 billion, and ChatGPT now sees roughly 700 million people use it every week. The company thinks revenue could jump to $20 billion by December, growth that’s hard for investors to ignore.

Dragoneer Investment Group led this round with a huge $2.8 billion check. Other big names, Blackstone, TPG, T. Rowe Price, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia, and more, joined in. Some early backers actually got smaller shares this time, because so many new investors wanted in.

Apple just hit a record very few companies ever see, three billion iPhones sold. Tim Cook revealed the figure during the company’s July 31 earnings call, eighteen years after the first iPhone reached stores in 2007.

The path to this milestone tells its own story about demand. Apple needed nine years to move the first billion units, crossing that mark in 2016. It then shipped another two billion phones in the following nine years, showing that interest has stayed steady even as the wider smartphone market has cooled.

iPhone sales did more than add a line to the history books. They jumped thirteen percent year over year in the most recent quarter, bringing in 44.6 billion dollars. That single product line provided almost half of Apple’s total quarterly revenue of 94 billion dollars.

Analysts say at least part of the surge came from U.S. shoppers rushing to buy before possible import tariffs that some pundits claimed could push prices sharply higher. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman even joked that wild cost rumors may have given Apple an unexpected boost this spring. The strong quarter arrives during a year when Apple’s share price has lagged behind faster-growing giants like Nvidia and Microsoft.

During Amazon’s July 31 earnings call, CEO Andy Jassy told investors he sees “room for advertising” inside multi-turn chats with the new AI voice assistant, Alexa+. while you’re asking Alexa+ for shopping tips or recipes, it could slip in paid suggestions for products.

Alexa+ already reaches millions of users and is free for Prime members ($14.99 a month) or $20 on its own. Jassy hinted Amazon could add extra subscription tiers, including a pricier, ad-free version, once conversational ads roll out. Ads in a smart-speaker chat would be brand-new territory. Today, Alexa only shows the occasional banner on an Echo Show screen or a short audio spot between songs. Spinning up real-time, AI-generated ads inside your conversation is a first for Amazon, and for the industry. Competitors like Google and even OpenAI are exploring similar ideas, so the race is on.

Amazon just spent a record $31 billion last quarter to build AI chips and data centers, and its ad business grew 22 percent year over year. Turning Alexa+ chats into ad space could help pay those bills, if customers don’t find it creepy. Alexa+ sometimes “hallucinates,” and it collects a lot more personal data than the old Alexa. Before brands sign up, Amazon will need to prove the assistant won’t pitch wrong products, or overshare user info. Early reviews of Alexa+ are mixed, so Amazon still has work to do before ad-supported conversations feel useful, not invasive.

Anthropic is on the verge of a giant cash boost up to $5 billion, that would lift its value to about $170 billion. A Bloomberg leak says the AI-safety-focused startup is talking with investors about raising between $3 billion and $5 billion, with Iconiq Capital set to lead the deal. If the round closes, Anthropic’s price tag would almost triple since March, when it was last valued at $61.5 billion.

Iconiq may share top-billing with a second lead investor, while Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund (QIA) and Singapore’s GIC are also in the mix, according to the report. Building frontier language models costs serious money, think thousands of GPUs and massive energy bills. Anthropic’s earlier $3.5 billion round gave it breathing room, but CEO Dario Amodei told staff the company still needs deeper pockets to keep pace with rivals like OpenAI.

Amodei recently admitted in an internal memo that he’s “not thrilled” about taking cash from governments with shaky human-rights records, yet the capital requirements leave few alternative pools that can write multi-billion-dollar checks. “No bad person should ever benefit from our success” is hard to follow when model training costs soar, he wrote.  If the deal closes, Anthropic would rank among the most valuable private tech companies on earth, trailing only giants like OpenAI and SpaceX.

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