Anthropic wants $3.5B from Japanese investors

What happened: Anthropic plans to sell up to 552.9 billion yen, about $3.5 billion, of new shares to investors in Japan as part of its proposed US listing.

• A filing made public on Monday, November 2, shows the plan, using an exchange rate of 157.82 yen to the dollar.
• Mizuho Securities manages the Japan sale, and Goldman Sachs and two Morgan Stanley-linked Japanese firms are taking subscription applications.
• The Japan portion is larger than the $2.2 billion Japanese investors secured in SpaceX's $75 billion IPO in June, the largest ever at the time. The new shares will fund working capital, operating expenses and capital expenditure, and the filing does not…

Why it matters: The company plans to list Class A common stock on Nasdaq under the ticker ANT, which will put a public price on one of the leading AI labs. For founders, a listing like this sets a benchmark for AI valuations and can pull investor attention toward the biggest names.

What happened: Salesforce has signed a definitive agreement to buy Cresta, a voice-first customer experience platform whose AI agents handle complex phone calls.

• Salesforce did not disclose terms, but The Information, citing a person familiar with the deal, reported a price of roughly $2.7 billion, which Salesforce has not confirmed.
• Cresta's last public valuation was $1.6 billion, set in a March 2022 Series C round.
• Cresta's voice agents will sit inside Service Cloud alongside Salesforce's own agents, and Marriott, Comcast and Alaska Airlines are named as customers. The deal is expected to close from February through April 2027, pending regulatory approvals.

Why it matters: A voice agent company with named enterprise customers drew a large buyer, which shows that phone support is a clear exit path for founders. If you build for contact centers, expect incumbents to buy rather than build, and make sure your product plugs into the telephony platforms customers already use.

What happened: OpenAI will agree with utilities on how much load each of its future data center campuses can drop, how fast, and for how long.

• The first pilot is a 3.2GW campus in Effingham County, Georgia, which OpenAI says equals the average demand of about 700,000 homes.
• OpenAI will pay the full cost of the power lines and service the campus needs, and the pledge covers campuses it builds directly, not capacity it rents from cloud partners or third-party operators.
• OpenAI expects deals with large users to save customers about $950M a year from 2029, and it says this flexibility cannot replace new generation and transmission.

Why it matters: Power access is becoming the main limit on how much compute you can get. Utilities will likely ask data center tenants for demand-response terms, meaning they agree to cut load when the grid is tight, so ask for clear clauses and find out who pays for grid upgrades before you sign a lease.