TL;DR: In July 2026, Multiverse Computing announced a $570M Series C at a $1.7 billion pre-money valuation - a 5x step-up from its 2025 Series B. The Spanish startup's core claim: quantum-inspired algorithms can compress AI models by up to 95%, cut inference costs by 50–80%, and run on standard hardware you already own. This article breaks down the technology, the real benchmarks, the customers, and whether this is a genuine paradigm shift or a very well-funded science project. The AI Compute Cost Crisis Nobody Talks About There's a number that doesn't show up in most AI press releases: $400–450 billion . That's what Deloitte estimates the world will spend on AI data-center capital expenditure in 2026 alone - with $250–300 billion of that going purely to chips. The AI industry has a cost problem. And it's getting worse, not better. Why Training and Running AI Models Is Bankrupting Companies Most people think the expensive part of AI is training. It'...