Three deals last week put a price on the AI infrastructure layer. Stripe acquired OpenRouter for approximately $7.5 billion. Marvell granted Google a warrant to buy up to $12.2 billion in its shares as part of a custom chip partnership. Databricks closed $5 billion in new funding at a $190 billion valuation. The three transactions span different instruments, from acquisition to equity-linked supply agreement to venture round, but all three target the operational layer between AI models and the enterprises that deploy them.
The token switchboard
OpenRouter routes requests across more than 400 models from over 80 providers, selecting the optimal model for each call based on task, cost, speed, and reliability. The startup raised $113 million at a $1.3 billion valuation in May. Three months later, Stripe paid 5.4 times that valuation to acquire it.
Stripe has spent fifteen years optimizing payments across competing variables like authorization rates, fraud risk, and payment method. Token routing presents a structurally similar problem, with model selection, task complexity, and latency replacing those payment-side variables. Stripe had already launched its own Token Billing product before the acquisition. CEO Patrick Collison described tokens as “the central currency for companies building with AI,” and OpenRouter CEO Alex Atallah had called his company “Stripe for AI” in May.
The acquisition also gives Stripe visibility into token spending patterns across a broad slice of the market. OpenRouter serves customers including NVIDIA, Zoom, and Lovable, and its routing decisions generate data on model performance, pricing, and usage across providers that no single model vendor possesses. For a company that already sees the revenue side of AI businesses through payment flows, the addition of cost-side intelligence creates a more comprehensive picture of AI unit economics.
Buying the supplier
Marvell Technology disclosed last Wednesday that it had granted Google a warrant to purchase up to 59 million shares at $206.58 apiece, worth approximately $12.2 billion if fully exercised. The underlying commercial agreement, signed in late July, covers inference accelerators, storage controllers, and network interface controllers for Google’s tensor processing unit ecosystem.
The warrant vests in tranches tied to every $500 million in chips that Google purchases through fiscal 2033. Google’s ownership stake in Marvell will scale in direct proportion to its procurement spending, giving the chipmaker a financial incentive to prioritize Google’s silicon roadmap. Broadcom, Google’s incumbent custom chip partner through a separate agreement running to 2031, fell roughly 5% on the news while Marvell climbed more than 10%.
Google, Amazon, and Microsoft have all pursued custom chip alternatives to Nvidia’s GPUs in recent years, seeking both lower inference costs and architectural control over hardware that runs their largest workloads. The financial instruments binding these partnerships have grown more complex as procurement commitments extend further into the future. Equity-linked warrants represent a step beyond conventional supply contracts, tying the chipmaker’s financial upside directly to the volume of silicon its partner consumes. The arrangement makes the supplier’s shareholders and its largest customer one and the same.
The value of raw data
Databricks closed its $5 billion round on August 13 at a $190 billion valuation, up from $134 billion six months earlier and $62 billion in January 2025. The company has crossed $7 billion in annualized revenue, growing at 80% year over year, and its Lakehouse data warehousing product has reached $1.5 billion in annualized revenue at 100% growth.
CEO Ali Ghodsi said that the company had intended to raise $1 billion before investor interest reached $15 billion. The funds target Lakebase, a database for AI agents that has crossed $100 million in revenue, and Genie, an AI assistant built on enterprise data. Ghodsi indicated that Databricks will remain private for now, citing “too much distraction” in the public markets, though the company’s $190 billion private valuation already exceeds that of publicly traded rival Snowflake.