Midas Market Pulse, AI Investing & Trends for 17th of July 2025

🔥 Infrastructure, Independence & Sustainability Today’s Critical AI Investing Trends

The AI investment landscape pivoted sharply yesterday on infrastructure strategy, startup independence, and regulatory foresight. Blackstone and Banyan fund moves highlighted physical backbone plays for AI. OpenAI’s cloud diversification signals a new compute model. Meanwhile, a proposed climate tax on energy heavy AI and crypto raises fresh stakes for investors.

📈 AI Market Movers & Trends

Blackstone commits $25 billion to AI ready data centers in Pennsylvania in partnership with utility PPL. The firm plans campuses adjacent to gas fired power plants, aiming to reduce latency and support escalating AI compute demand. The move builds on Blackstone’s earlier $85 billion infrastructure build out, underscoring that AI is not just software but also a real estate and energy play. With global compute requirements climbing, data center capacity is quickly emerging as a bottleneck, private equity is racing to fill the gap.

💸 Funding Watch

Banyan Ventures announced its debut $10 million “AI Fund I”, led by 31‑year‑old Sam Awrabi. Targeting pre seed and seed stage startups, the fund focuses on foundational infrastructure, spanning inference processors, cooling, and data‑handling services, with initial investments in firms like Lexroom and Positron. With average checks of $200K to $425K across around 36 companies, Banyan’s thesis contrasts with the current surge in generative AI capitalization. It reflects a growing shift toward investing in the unseen machinery powering AI at scale.

🧩 Infrastructure Strategy Alert

OpenAI listed Google Cloud as a compute partner, marking its first formal move away from exclusive reliance on Microsoft Azure and Nvidia GPUs. The deal, finalized in May, enables ChatGPT and related services to run on Google’s Tensor Processing Units, largely for inference workloads, to diversify cloud exposure, cut costs, and reduce vendor risk. This move suggests AI leaders are now embracing multi‑cloud, multi chip strategies as core to operational resilience.

🪙 Token & Energy Policy Watch

A European environmental coalition is advocating a global climate tax on energy intensive AI and crypto systems, led by Laurence Tubiana of the Paris Agreement. Their proposal estimates potential revenues exceeding €105 billion annually through levies on compute and transactions. While still conceptual, this regulatory shift signals heightened scrutiny of AI’s carbon footprint, which could meaningfully change how we value infrastructure heavy AI and blockchain businesses.

🌐 Open Source Intelligence

Perplexity AI is nearing a $500 million funding round that would value the company at approximately $14 billion, driven by ongoing user growth and increasing adoption of its AI powered search engine. CEO Aravind Srinivas emphasized the company’s intent to remain independent from Big Tech, positioning Perplexity as a credible challenger to Google, helping define digital search's next frontier.

📊 Midas Perspective

1. Infrastructure bets are accelerating, with both real estate and compute platforms drawing massive investment.

2. Compute diversification is table stakes; AI leaders are increasingly hedging across clouds and chips.

3. Regulatory risk is materializing; climate policy may soon constrain energy heavy AI and crypto builds.

4. Startup independence matters; Perplexity’s trajectory illustrates investor appetite for differentiated AI plays outside of Big Tech control.

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