On Tuesday, the AI company Recursive Superintelligence announced a $410 million compute deal with Amazon Web Services. The company, which emerged from stealth in May with $650 million in funding, is focused on building open-ended self-improving systems, a potentially compute-intensive approach to AI research. This multiyear deal is meant to provide flexibility as the company looks to scale up those systems.

Recursive’s $410 million outlay represents the bulk of the company’s fundraising to date — but on a call with TechCrunch, founder and CEO Richard Socher emphasized that he expected it to be the first of many such deals. Today’s announcement is “likely going to be one of the smallest compute deals we’re going to sign in the next few years,” Socher said.

Recursive’s emphasis on self-improving AI systems means much of the budget that would traditionally go toward headcount and operations is put straight into compute, as the company seeks to automate its own product development process. 

“For us, it’s less about headcount and more about agent count,” Socher said.

There’s no investment component to Amazon’s involvement, in contrast to major labs’ habit of hybrid investment arrangements. But the sheer scale of the commitment allows AWS to commit significant resources to supporting Recursive’s unique needs, which may help to draw in other foundation-level AI companies going forward.

“Part of the agreement is that we’re going to co-develop infrastructure purpose-built for these types of compan[ies],” said Jason Bennett, VP for startups and venture capital at AWS.

Recursive self-improvement (RSI) has long been seen as an inflection point for AI, with some expecting an explosion of progress once AI can be improved without human involvement. But as more labs and companies pursue the idea, the specific requirements have become ambiguous, with some predicting an imminent breakthrough while others characterize self-improvement as more of a continuum.

But in Recursive’s case, the goal is to use the powers of RSI to develop actual products — and Socher expects to be releasing the earliest examples before the end of the year.

“We are excited to build like really amazing products that people can use, and you will see those within a few months, not within a few quarters or years,” Socher says. “In October or so, you’ll see some actually tangible, useful things that you’ll be able to play around with.”

X is launching its X Money app for paid X subscribers in the United States.

Users get an X Visa debit card, which they can immediately add to Apple Pay and use to make instant peer-to-peer transfers within the app without fees or limits. They will also receive a physical X Visa debit card that, according to X Money, has no foreign transaction fees and offers free cash withdrawals at worldwide ATMs.

Prince Al Waleed bin Talal Al Saud, a member of the Saudi royal family, has purchased a 5% stake in Lucid Motors, increasing the Kingdom’s overall ownership of the electric vehicle company.

A new filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission published Tuesday shows that the billionaire prince recently purchased a little more than 19 million shares. In a post on X, he wrote that his investment office made the purchase when Lucid’s market cap was below $2 billion.

That happened on July 14, when an electric vehicle blog published a report claiming that Lucid was considering either filing for bankruptcy protection or being taken private by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund. Lucid strenuously denied the reports, and the company’s stock price has since rebounded.

“We don’t comment on individual investments, but we are aware and appreciate the independent vote of confidence,” Lucid Motors’ chief communications officer Nick Twork said in a statement to TechCrunch.

The share purchase comes in the middle of a major restructuring effort kicked off by Lucid’s newly appointed CEO, Silvio Napoli, who cut 18% of the workforce in June in an effort to “simplify the company.” That followed a similarly large layoff earlier this year before Napoli took over.

Lucid Motors has been majority-owned by the wealth fund — known as the Public Investment Fund, or PIF — since its initial investment in 2018. That investment came after Saudi Arabia considered, but ultimately abandoned, plans to take Tesla private. The PIF has owned roughly 60% of Lucid Motors since the EV maker merged with a special purpose acquisition company in 2021, a transaction that brought it to public markets and raised $4 billion.

The Saudis have remained a major source of financial support for Lucid Motors since it went public, buying up shares and lending billions of dollars as the company has struggled to reach a mass market of EV buyers in the U.S. and abroad.

Prince Al Waleed bin Talal has a history of investing in U.S. tech. Through his holding company, he was a major shareholder of Twitter when it was still public. In 2022, he initially balked at Elon Musk’s attempt to buy the social media company. But he quickly reversed course and cozied up to Musk and became the second-largest shareholder of Twitter after Musk took it private. (It’s unclear whether he has retained that stake through the company’s evolution into X and its subsequent merger with xAI, and now into SpaceX.)

He also owns stakes in Snap and Deezer and is often referred to as the “Arabian Warren Buffett,” according to his website.