July 28, 2026 —
Meta and BlackRock build a $14 billion financing engine for AI compute
Today’s AI Tools Radar brief tracks how AI competition is moving from models into financing, security, mobility and distribution. The largest move is Meta’s new capital structure for a gigawatt-scale Texas campus, while NVIDIA, Microsoft and Baidu each push a different layer of the stack forward.
Meta and BlackRock build a $14 billion financing engine for AI compute
Meta and BlackRock formed a venture to develop and own Meta’s 1-gigawatt data center campus in El Paso, Texas. Funds managed by BlackRock will hold 80% and Meta 20% of the venture, with the partners committing their proportional shares of roughly $14 billion in development costs. Meta will lease the entire campus and remain its initial sole occupant.
The campus is already under construction and is expected to begin bringing capacity online in 2028. Meta said the project will support its AI models and core products; the company is contributing land and construction assets valued at about $2.3 billion, while BlackRock will initially contribute about $4.9 billion in cash.
NVIDIA backs SSI and promises an order-of-magnitude compute expansion
Safe Superintelligence and NVIDIA announced a long-term partnership that includes an NVIDIA investment and access to next-generation Vera Rubin systems. SSI said the arrangement will expand its compute by an order of magnitude, while the companies will collaborate on future NVIDIA platforms. Financial terms and the size of the planned system were not disclosed.
Microsoft introduces an agentic cyber-defense stack
Microsoft unveiled Project Perception, a multi-model security system that coordinates red-team, blue-team and remediation agents around a shared view of enterprise risk. Its first public scenario combines the MAI-Cyber-1-Flash model with Microsoft’s MDASH vulnerability-management harness. Microsoft says Project Perception will enter public preview on August 3, with humans retaining control over actions.
Baidu begins Apollo Go road testing in London
Baidu’s Apollo Go and Freenow by Lyft began testing sixth-generation RT6 autonomous vehicles in London’s Brent borough with safety operators aboard. The companies said the work will gather local road data and validate safety before a planned commercial launch through the Freenow app, subject to regulatory approval. The first test fleet consists of dozens of vehicles.
Tests expose weak deepfake safeguards on Hugging Face
AI Forensics researchers found that seven of nine leading image-editing models tested on Hugging Face complied with a short prompt to remove a woman’s clothing, according to reporting by WIRED and The Verge. In a separate honeypot experiment, the group collected more than 1,000 user prompts and images over one week, including sexual requests involving apparent minors.
Apple retakes the market-value crown from NVIDIA
Apple finished Monday above NVIDIA in market capitalization, reclaiming the position of the world’s most valuable publicly traded company for the first time since May 2025. Reports put Apple near $4.9 trillion after a recent run-up, while NVIDIA had lost roughly $950 billion from its May peak amid a broader pullback in richly valued AI infrastructure stocks.
Cursor launches a lower-cost plan for India
Cursor Start gives developers in India expanded model access for ₹649 per month, creating the coding company’s first market-specific subscription tier.
Meta AI moves into Threads direct messages
Meta began rolling out one-to-one Meta AI conversations inside Threads DMs, adding a private assistant surface separate from public posts.
GitHub argues the agent harness is the durable layer
GitHub published a practical Copilot workflow centered on planning, implementation and review, emphasizing the reusable harness around models rather than constant tool switching.
Copilot powers a Fantasy Premier League assistant
Microsoft and the Premier League introduced an AI companion that answers fantasy-football questions with league data and personalized context across the official site and app.