Reflection AI Raises $2B to Build "American DeepSeek" (www.nytimes.com)

Reflection AI announced a $2 billion funding round led by Nvidia that values the year-old startup at about $8 billion. Nvidia reportedly contributed $800 million and seconded engineers to help optimize Reflection’s latest chip workloads; other investors include Lightspeed, Sequoia, DST, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and 1789 Capital. The raise comes seven months after a $130 million round and a prior PitchBook valuation of roughly $545 million, underscoring rapid investor enthusiasm for AI ventures as foundation-model fundraising worldwide nears $72 billion this year. Technically and strategically, Reflection is positioning itself to build an “American DeepSeek”: an open-source foundation-model lab that can match powerful closed-source Chinese and Western models. The bet is that governments and enterprises will prefer locally controllable, modifiable models, but achieving parity requires massive compute, high-end chip optimization, and top research talent—hence the heavy capital and Nvidia partnership. The round signals growing investor willingness to back open-source AI despite concerns about misuse, and it highlights a broader geopolitical race for model leadership as incumbents (and chip suppliers) pour ever-larger resources into both proprietary and open ecosystems.