Feb 7, 2026

AI News Roundup: Anthropic's $20B Mega-Round, the SaaSpocalypse Deepens, and AI Is Causing Shortages Everywhere

The numbers keep getting bigger and the ripple effects keep getting wider. Anthropic is closing a $20 billion+ funding round at a $350 billion valuation, Amazon shares are sliding after projecting $200 billion in AI spending, and the Washington Post is documenting how AI infrastructure buildouts are causing shortages of everything from electricians to RAM chips. Meanwhile, the “SaaSpocalypse” triggered by Anthropic’s Cowork plugins earlier this week has now spread from public software stocks to private equity portfolios.

Here’s everything that matters from February 7, 2026.

The Big Story: Anthropic’s $20B+ Mega-Round Closes Next Week

Anthropic is finalizing a funding round exceeding $20 billion, slated to close as early as next week, at a valuation of $350 billion. The company originally targeted $10 billion but doubled the goal after being overwhelmed by investor demand.

The investor roster reads like a who’s who of big capital: Coatue Management, Singapore’s GIC, and Iconiq Capital are each contributing over $1 billion. NVIDIA and Microsoft are combining for up to $15 billion. Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Altimeter Capital, and Menlo Ventures round out the syndicate.

This is a staggering number by any measure — it would rank among the largest private funding rounds in history. Coming the same week Anthropic launched Opus 4.6 and its Cowork plugins cratered SaaS stocks, the round signals that investors see Anthropic not just as a model provider but as a platform company capable of reshaping entire industries. At $350 billion, Anthropic’s valuation now exceeds the market cap of companies like Coca-Cola and Bank of America.

Today’s Top Stories

The SaaSpocalypse Spreads to Private Markets

The software selloff that began with Anthropic’s Cowork plugins earlier this week has spread beyond public markets. At the IPEM Wealth conference in Cannes, the mood was grim as private equity firms confronted the implications — PE firms spent $256 billion on software acquisitions in 2021 alone, and those portfolios are now being repriced. Thomson Reuters and LegalZoom continued to bleed, each down more than 15% on the week, with double-digit declines also hitting RELX and FactSet. Some analysts have dubbed it the “SaaSpocalypse” and the damage is still being tallied.

Amazon Falls After Projecting $200 Billion in AI Spending

Amazon shares dropped 5.6% on Friday to $210.32 after the company projected roughly $200 billion in 2026 capital expenditures — a 50%+ surge over 2025 — almost entirely directed at AI infrastructure through AWS. Q1 operating income guidance of $16.5-$21.5 billion came in below the $22.2 billion analyst consensus. The silver lining: AWS revenue hit $35.6 billion (up 24% YoY), its fastest growth since 2022. Combined with Alphabet ($175-185B), Meta ($135B), and Microsoft, Big Tech’s total AI spend is now approaching $700 billion.

The AI Boom Is Causing Shortages Everywhere Else

The Washington Post published a sweeping investigation into how hundreds of billions in AI infrastructure spending are draining resources from the broader economy. Electricians are harder to find as data center construction swallows available labor. Samsung warned that GPU, RAM, and SSD shortages are driving up prices for smartphones, laptops, TVs, and home appliances. Dell and Lenovo have hiked PC prices 15-20%. The piece paints a picture of an economy where AI buildouts are creating a resource squeeze felt far beyond Silicon Valley.

xAI Merger Poses Growing Threat to OpenAI and Anthropic

Bloomberg reports that the xAI merger with SpaceX is shaping up as a more significant competitive threat to OpenAI and Anthropic than initially expected. With access to SpaceX’s infrastructure and Elon Musk’s capital, the combined entity could accelerate xAI’s ability to compete for enterprise AI contracts.

Quick Hits

AI Regulation: New York introduced the FAIR News Act, requiring disclaimers on AI-generated news content, mandating human editorial review, and prohibiting replacing human journalists with AI. Endorsed by SAG-AFTRA, WGA East, and the NY State AFL-CIO.
Healthcare AI: India launched iLive Connect, the world’s first doctor-led AI healthcare ecosystem using wearable biosensors — an observational study of 410 patients showed a 76% reduction in hospital readmissions.
Waymo: The autonomous driving company’s World Model, built on Google DeepMind’s Genie 3, drew 1,013 points on Hacker News for its photorealistic driving simulations.
Performance Engineering: Brendan Gregg joined OpenAI, calling AI datacenter costs “a call for performance engineering like no other in history.”
Education: The U.S. Department of Education awarded $169 million to support responsible AI use in higher education.
Developer Tools: Pydantic released Monty, a Rust-based sandboxed Python interpreter for LLMs with microsecond startup times, and Google launched a Developer Knowledge API and MCP server providing machine-readable access to all Google developer docs.
OpenAI Backlash: The retirement of GPT-4o on February 13 continues to generate protests from ~800,000 users with emotional attachments to AI companions built on the model.
AI Advertising: Google and Microsoft are paying content creators $400K-$600K for long-term AI product promotion deals, with digital ad spending on AI products up 495% year-over-year.

What This Means

The through-line of February 7 is scale — and its consequences. Anthropic raising $20 billion, Big Tech committing nearly $700 billion to AI infrastructure, and resource shortages rippling through the broader economy all point to an industry that has moved past the experimentation phase into a full-blown industrial buildout. The SaaSpocalypse spreading from public markets to private equity signals that this isn’t a temporary correction but a fundamental repricing of what software companies are worth in a world where AI agents can replicate their core functionality. For the rest of the economy, the Washington Post’s reporting on electrician shortages and PC price hikes is a reminder that AI’s appetite for compute, power, and talent doesn’t exist in a vacuum — it comes at the direct expense of everything else competing for those same resources.