Together AI raises $800M at $8.3B, and Aramco is betting on open-model inference
Together AI, the neocloud that rents out Nvidia GPU clusters and hosts open-source models, raised an $800 million Series C at an $8.3 billion valuation, announced July 1. The lead is Aramco Ventures, with a long tail behind it: Vista Equity Partners, General Catalyst, Emergence Capital, Nvidia, March Capital, Pegatron, and SentinelOne's S Ventures. Annual bookings crossed $1.15 billion last quarter.
The real story is the customer list: Cursor, Cognition, Decagon. The agent companies eating the world all run on inference, and increasingly they run it on open-weight models rather than closed frontier APIs. Together says open-model usage across the industry tripled over the past year. When your coding agent fires 200 tool calls to finish one task, the per-token cost of the model underneath is basically your entire margin. Open weights on cheap capacity is how you survive that math.
Zoom out and it's the compute-landlord thesis again. SpaceX renting capacity to Anthropic and Google, Groq's $650M neocloud round in June, now Together at $8.3B with Saudi oil money leading. Petrodollars are rotating into GPU capacity, and the picks-and-shovels layer of the agent boom is where the biggest checks keep landing. Aramco leading this one says something specific: sovereign capital now reads inference as infrastructure, not as a tech bet. That's a different kind of money showing up, and it doesn't show up for fads.
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The real story is the customer list: Cursor, Cognition, Decagon. The agent companies eating the world all run on inference, and increasingly they run it on open-weight models rather than closed frontier APIs. Together says open-model usage across the industry tripled over the past year. When your coding agent fires 200 tool calls to finish one task, the per-token cost of the model underneath is basically your entire margin. Open weights on cheap capacity is how you survive that math.
Zoom out and it's the compute-landlord thesis again. SpaceX renting capacity to Anthropic and Google, Groq's $650M neocloud round in June, now Together at $8.3B with Saudi oil money leading. Petrodollars are rotating into GPU capacity, and the picks-and-shovels layer of the agent boom is where the biggest checks keep landing. Aramco leading this one says something specific: sovereign capital now reads inference as infrastructure, not as a tech bet. That's a different kind of money showing up, and it doesn't show up for fads.
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