Strategy did not add to its Bitcoin holdings last week, selling $334 million worth of stocks and lifting its U.S. dollar reserves to $4.8 billion.

According to official announcements, HertzFlow, a perpetual contract trading infrastructure project backed by YZi Labs, has officially launched on the BNB Chain mainnet and simultaneously kicked off a one-week Genesis Vault mainnet pre-deposit campaign. Co-hosted by HertzFlow, United Stables (U), and the official team of WLFI ecosystem stablecoin USD1, the campaign allows users to deposit USD1 or U to build the mainnet’s initial liquidity. The USD1 vault has a $4.44 million cap, while the U vault is capped at $8.88 million; both have hard limits and operate on a first-come, first-served basis. Meanwhile, HertzFlow’s mainnet Merit points campaign is also live: liquidity providers who hold their deposits for 90 days will receive a 10x points bonus, and will gain corresponding actual returns once perpetual contract trading opens on August 24. With the mainnet launch and points campaign launching in tandem, HertzFlow aims to expand its perpetual contract trading infrastructure’s liquidity scale via early liquidity incentives and prepare for subsequent trading function rollouts.

OpenAI co-founder and president Greg Brockman addressed external concerns over the company’s executive turnover in an exclusive interview with CNBC, noting, “I actually think what sets OpenAI apart from other organizations is that we get so much attention, so every departure is scrutinized in a way it wouldn’t be at other companies.” He also bluntly said this current wave of departures is not actually that atypical, stressing that he and Sam Altman form the company’s stable core. “I am a constant, Sam is a constant, and I think it’s because of this resilience and diversity that we are stronger.” Brockman’s comments come amid frequent senior management changes at OpenAI. Revenue chief Denise Dresser stepped down suddenly after just 8 months in the role; she was a key figure leading the company’s enterprise business expansion. Two days prior, Brad Lightcap, a long-time executive with 8 years at the firm, also announced his exit to launch a new venture. OpenAI has named Dali Rajic, former COO of cybersecurity company Wiz (acquired by Google for $32 billion), as its new chief revenue officer.

Voice AI company Wispr announced it has closed a $280 million Series B funding round, with a post-money valuation of $2 billion. The round was led by Menlo Ventures, marking one of the firm’s largest investments in an AI company to date. Existing investors Notable Capital, NEA, Neo Ventures, 8VC, and MVP Ventures participated, while new backers include Acrew, Forerunner, Goodwater, Peak XV, Together Fund, and PLUS Capital. The latest round comes just six months after Wispr’s oversubscribed Series A2 round, bringing its total raised to $361 million. In addition to institutional investors, a number of athletes and cultural figures also joined the round, including Livvy Dunne, Shaun White, Dak Prescott, Joe Burrow, Klay Thompson, and Trae Young. The funding follows the rapid growth of Wispr’s flagship voice dictation product, Flow. Flow has amassed millions of global users, with adoption across over 125,000 enterprises, and employees at most Fortune 500 companies use the tool. Wispr stated its revenue has grown by more than 150% in each of the past four quarters, reflecting that voice is evolving from an occasional dictation tool to a standard interaction method for content creation, idea exchange, and cross-software work. The company is also launching its first self-developed voice model, further deepening vertical integration from interface applications to the model layer.

U.S. AI chip firm Groq has closed a $350 million funding round, valuing the company at $3.5 billion — a sharp drop from its peak valuation of $6.9 billion last year. The round was led by Dallas-based investment firm Disruptive, with participation from NVIDIA. Earlier, NVIDIA struck a licensing deal with Groq and hired its founder and CEO Jonathan Ross, along with several key team members. Groq is now shifting to data center operations, focusing on meeting computing power needs for AI inference, and plans to expand its total data center capacity to over 200 megawatts by next year. Founded by former Google engineer Jonathan Ross, Groq specializes in designing LPUs (Language Processing Units) optimized specifically for AI inference, and offers high-speed, low-latency GroqCloud inference cloud services. At the end of 2025, NVIDIA entered into a roughly $20 billion technology licensing agreement with Groq and poached its core team, after which Groq became an NVIDIA cloud partner.

NVIDIA announced it will invest $1.5 billion in SoftBank’s subsidiary SB Energy, and secure Ohio’s Ports-Pike Technology Campus exclusively to host its artificial intelligence (AI) computing operations. Under the agreement, SB Energy will operate the data center under a 20-year lease signed with OpenAI, which will serve as the customer for the project’s 8 IT gigawatt capacity. NVIDIA is also providing credit support for the project’s initial 4.25 IT gigawatt phase, while retaining the option to add an additional 3.75 IT gigawatts of capacity. The Ports-Pike project is expected to create tens of thousands of jobs, establish an $80 million community fund, with OpenAI set to contribute an extra $40 million to the community welfare fund. Separately, market sources indicate that following its deal with NVIDIA, Groq’s valuation in its latest funding round has reached $3.5 billion.

According to market data from BIT (bit.com), U.S. storage sector stocks rallied broadly in pre-market trading. Japanese storage firm Kioxia’s American Depositary Receipts (ADRs) jumped more than 17%. Seagate Technology (STX) added 1.96%, Western Digital (WDC) rose 2.59%, SanDisk (SNDK) gained 3.33%, Micron Technology (MU) climbed 2.66%, and SK Hynix ADRs advanced 3.4%.