Analysis
Look at where the biggest checks actually landed this month and a pattern shows up that the AI headlines mostly miss: the largest rounds increasingly fund physical infrastructure, not software.
- Valar Atomics -- $1B Series B led by Sequoia Capital at a $6B valuation, building compact nuclear reactors for AI data centers. That's triple the $2B mark it carried in April, weeks after using a fission reaction to power an Nvidia AI chip directly.
- Base Power -- $1B Series D at a $13B valuation, for a business that leases home batteries and resells the aggregated capacity back to the grid.
- Hadrian -- $1.37B Series D at a $7.87B valuation, roughly five times its prior mark, to keep automating the factories that machine precision parts for SpaceX and Anduril.
- River AI -- $1.1B seed round for a company founded by xAI co-founder Igor Babuschkin, raised just two months out of stealth to build AI training infrastructure rather than another chat interface.
“That's triple the $2B mark it carried in April, weeks after using a fission reaction to power an Nvidia AI chip directly.”
None of this means software rounds have dried up -- Databricks closed $5B at a $190B valuation the same week, backed by a $7B-plus revenue run-rate growing more than 80% year over year.
What it means is that the ceiling on software valuations is now set by revenue multiples investors can defend, while infrastructure rounds are being priced on capacity that doesn't yet exist: reactors not yet built, batteries not yet installed, factories not yet at scale.
That's a different kind of bet, and a riskier one on execution. A software company that misses a quarter loses growth rate. An infrastructure company that misses a construction timeline loses the contract that justified the valuation in the first place. Four separate lead investors -- Sequoia, JPMorgan's Strategic Investment Group, a six-firm Hadrian syndicate, and General Catalyst -- made that trade this month anyway, which says the capital scarcity right now isn't dollars. It's steel, permits, and grid interconnects.
