News linked to both this project and an event.
Odaily News Nvidia-backed AI cloud computing provider Lambda is raising $917 million through the leveraged loan market to procure AI chips. As artificial intelligence infrastructure construction accelerates, chip financing is emerging as a new avenue for capital investment in the AI industry.Lambda belongs to the rapidly growing camp of "neoclouds" in recent years, primarily offering GPU computing power and AI infrastructure services to enterprises and developers. This financing plan will be carried out through a GPU-backed loan based on GPU asset-related rights, designed to support the company in expanding its AI computing resources.According to reports, AI infrastructure companies are actively exploring new financing methods to meet the massive capital investments required to build large-scale computing clusters. Previously, AI cloud service provider CoreWeave completed the first chip financing transaction in the institutional leveraged loan market, providing a new financing model for the industry.As demand for generative AI continues to grow, Nvidia GPU supply has become a core resource for AI companies' expansion. By using GPU assets as a financing basis, AI cloud providers can rapidly scale up computing capacity without relying entirely on equity financing, while also bringing traditional credit markets into the wave of AI infrastructure investment. (Bloomberg)
Odaily News The x402 protocol, incubated by Coinbase, has announced the launch of a unified platform called Agent.market, positioned as an "AI Agent App Store" for centrally showcasing and integrating various tools and services built on the protocol. According to the introduction, Agent.market already covers seven major categories at launch: inference, data, media, search, social, infrastructure, and trading. It integrates service providers including OpenAI, Bloomberg, CoinGecko, LinkedIn, X, and AWS Lambda, and supports permissionless integration.Erik Reppel, Engineering Lead at Coinbase Developer Platform, stated that the platform is essentially "an app store for agents." Currently, there are approximately 69,000 active agents on the x402 network, which have cumulatively completed over 165 million transactions, with a transaction volume reaching $50 million. Most services on Agent.market adopt a pay-per-use model, with some charging an "agentic premium" for AI agents. However, costs can be reduced through subscriptions in high-frequency usage scenarios. Meanwhile, the "agent economy" based on x402 is lowering customer acquisition and integration costs for businesses, unlocking previously constrained demand due to API keys, subscriptions, and micro-payment mechanisms.The x402 protocol is named after the HTTP 402 "Payment Required" status code, enabling websites, APIs, and AI agents to conduct instant micropayments via blockchain and traditional payment channels. The protocol is governed as an open standard by the x402 Foundation under the Linux Foundation and has received support from over 20 technology and crypto institutions including Cloudflare, Stripe, Amazon Web Services, Google, and Visa. (The Block)