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AI Daily Brief — 22 July 2025

A heavyweight Tuesday dominated by two anchors: Alibaba’s Qwen3-Coder open-source agentic coding flagship, and OpenAI+Oracle’s 4.5 GW Stargate expansion. The day also produced a fresh AI unicorn (Reka) and a marquee agentic-enterprise round (Xelix $160M). Trump’s AI Action Plan was 24 hours away.

Top stories

  • Alibaba releases Qwen3-Coder-480B-A35B-Instruct. 480B-parameter MoE (35B active) with native 256K context (extensible to 1M via Yarn). Hits 69.6% on SWE-bench Verified at 500 turns, nearly matching Claude Sonnet 4 (70.4%). Apache 2.0 licence on Hugging Face, GitHub, Alibaba Cloud Model Studio and Qwen Chat. Alibaba’s most direct challenge yet to Anthropic in agentic coding. via Qwen Blog
  • MarkTechPost: Qwen3-Coder is China’s most powerful open agentic code model. Detailed the release as the most powerful open agentic code model to date, emphasising tool-use, browser-control and multi-turn agent loops as a frontier open-source capability. via MarkTechPost
  • OpenAI + Oracle confirm 4.5 GW Stargate expansion. Brings total Stargate capacity under development to over 5 GW running 2M+ chips. Parts of Stargate I in Abilene, Texas already operational; Oracle delivering first NVIDIA GB200 racks. OpenAI estimates 100K+ construction/ops jobs. Materially advances the $500B / 10 GW January commitment. via OpenAI
  • Reka AI raises $110M Series B at $1B valuation. Multimodal foundation-model lab. NVIDIA and Snowflake participated, more than tripling the valuation to over $1B (from ~$300M in 2023). Snowflake had previously been in M&A talks with Reka; instead Snowflake’s head of AI engineering confirmed Reka models will ship via the Snowflake marketplace. via Bloomberg
  • Xelix lands $160M Series B for agentic AI in Accounts Payable. London-based, led by Insight Partners. Platform audits 115M invoices and $750B+ in annual spend across 130+ customers (AstraZeneca, BAT, GSK, Virgin Atlantic). via PR Newswire

Who shipped

Alibaba shipped Qwen3-Coder. OpenAI + Oracle shipped Stargate expansion. Reka and Xelix shipped capital.

Open-source pulse

Qwen3-Coder is the most powerful open agentic code model to date — closes the gap with Claude Sonnet 4 at a fraction of the price and pairs well with Qwen3-235B refresh from the previous day. Anthropic’s legacy Claude 2.x/Sonnet 3 retirement (July 21) forced customers onto Claude 3.5 Sonnet/Claude 4 tiers just as Qwen3-Coder arrived as a credible open alternative.

Money, infra & hardware

OpenAI + Oracle Stargate expansion came against earlier reports of execution problems and SoftBank financing delays. via CNBC Tech Startups’ daily roundup also highlighted Fortuna Health $18M Series A and Asylon Robotics $26M Series B alongside the Reka and Xelix anchors. via Tech Startups

Quiet corners

Washington primed for the Trump AI Action Plan reveal Wednesday — 90-policy plan drafted by OSTP with three pillars (innovation acceleration, AI infrastructure permitting, international diplomacy/security) plus accompanying executive orders. EU Commission draft GPAI guidelines (July 18) remained the dominant compliance topic for European model providers.

By the numbers

  • 480B / 35B / 256K (1M) — Qwen3-Coder total params / active / context (extensible)
  • 69.6% vs 70.4% — Qwen3-Coder vs Claude Sonnet 4 on SWE-bench Verified
  • 4.5 GW / 5+ GW / 2M+ — Stargate expansion / total under development / chip count
  • $110M / $1B — Reka Series B / valuation
  • $160M / 115M / $750B+ — Xelix Series B / invoices audited / spend covered

Compiled by AI Feed’s editor from verified web sources for 22 July 2025.