Trump admits to having a secret backchannel with Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps

U.S. AI chip firm Groq has closed a $350 million funding round, valuing the company at $3.5 billion — a sharp drop from its peak valuation of $6.9 billion last year. The round was led by Dallas-based investment firm Disruptive, with participation from NVIDIA. Earlier, NVIDIA struck a licensing deal with Groq and hired its founder and CEO Jonathan Ross, along with several key team members. Groq is now shifting to data center operations, focusing on meeting computing power needs for AI inference, and plans to expand its total data center capacity to over 200 megawatts by next year. Founded by former Google engineer Jonathan Ross, Groq specializes in designing LPUs (Language Processing Units) optimized specifically for AI inference, and offers high-speed, low-latency GroqCloud inference cloud services. At the end of 2025, NVIDIA entered into a roughly $20 billion technology licensing agreement with Groq and poached its core team, after which Groq became an NVIDIA cloud partner.

NVIDIA announced it will invest $1.5 billion in SoftBank’s subsidiary SB Energy, and secure Ohio’s Ports-Pike Technology Campus exclusively to host its artificial intelligence (AI) computing operations. Under the agreement, SB Energy will operate the data center under a 20-year lease signed with OpenAI, which will serve as the customer for the project’s 8 IT gigawatt capacity. NVIDIA is also providing credit support for the project’s initial 4.25 IT gigawatt phase, while retaining the option to add an additional 3.75 IT gigawatts of capacity. The Ports-Pike project is expected to create tens of thousands of jobs, establish an $80 million community fund, with OpenAI set to contribute an extra $40 million to the community welfare fund. Separately, market sources indicate that following its deal with NVIDIA, Groq’s valuation in its latest funding round has reached $3.5 billion.

According to market data from BIT (bit.com), U.S. storage sector stocks rallied broadly in pre-market trading. Japanese storage firm Kioxia’s American Depositary Receipts (ADRs) jumped more than 17%. Seagate Technology (STX) added 1.96%, Western Digital (WDC) rose 2.59%, SanDisk (SNDK) gained 3.33%, Micron Technology (MU) climbed 2.66%, and SK Hynix ADRs advanced 3.4%.

OpenAI has pledged to massively deploy NVIDIA’s computing power infrastructure by 2030.

Senior Iranian officials have announced that Iran has decided to shift its policy from defensive to an all-out offensive. Additionally, in an interview today, former US President Donald Trump stated there is no timeline for ending the war with Iran, he is in no hurry, and demanded Iran "raise the white flag and surrender". Trump also noted that his considerations on resolving the war issue are "unrelated to the US midterm elections".

In June, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) proposed repealing Rule 611 (the trade-through rule), a core provision of Regulation NMS (Reg NMS), as well as the ban on locked or crossed quotes, arguing that order processing should be governed by market competition and brokers’ best execution obligations. HPC (Hyperliquid Policy Center) and Douro Labs (a core contributor to the Pyth Network) jointly submitted a comment letter backing the proposal, urging the SEC to provide principle-based best execution guidance for on-chain markets. The letter noted that Rule 611 is premised on all venues pre-disclosing quotes and having a central information processing system aggregate them into the National Best Bid and Offer (NBBO), a framework fundamentally incompatible with how on-chain transactions actually operate. Automated Market Maker (AMM)-type venues do not pre-disclose quotes, with prices determined in real time during trades based on liquidity pools; on-chain order books, meanwhile, operate entirely outside of centralized quote systems. It also called on the SEC to confirm that tokenized Reg NMS stocks remain subject to Reg NMS’s investor protection framework, adding that protections should not vary based on the settlement ledger used. Repealing Rule 611 would allow market structure to evolve through competition rather than regulatory design, and the letter recommended that when the NBBO is missing or does not reflect on-chain conditions, independent reference prices based on transparent, manipulation-resistant methodologies be recognized.