AI agents approach peak hype, Trump goes full crypto, CHIPS Act hangs by a nanothread – News

As Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff chart out competing visions of how agentic artificial intelligence will develop, agents are gaining traction in cybersecurity, telecom and beyond.

This past week, Salesforce kept pushing ahead with an agent skills marketplace and a new iteration of its Agentforce platform, while Microsoft unveiled its own AI agents for sales in direct competition with Salesforce. Now the question is when enterprises will climb on board, and that remains far from certain.

Sure, former President Biden took awhile to get CHIPS Act money distributed, but it mostly got done before he left. Now Trump is blowing it all up, for no apparent reason. Even so, TSMC will invest an additional $100 billion in U.S. fabs, assuming Taiwan can weather domestic criticism about it.

Graphics processing unit cloud operator CoreWeave filed to go public, and promptly acquired AI developer Weights & Biases. But it’s not likely to spur more IPOs, AI-related or otherwise. Microsoft commanded 62% of CoreWeave’s revenue last year, and we know Microsoft is scaling back its compute spending for AI — possibly including CoreWeave, though CoreWeave denies it. Besides, AI companies still seem to be raising all the money they want, as Anthropic proved again with a new $3.5 billion funding.

It was a mixed bag for enterprise earnings this week, as Broadcom, Okta and Zscaler shined, but HPE, MongoDB, CrowdStrike and Marvell Semiconductor tanked. We can probably expect choppiness for, well, who knows how long, but surely through next week as Oracle, UiPath and others report results.

Trump outlined his plans for a crypto reserve because — why, again? — even as one of his companies bought up crypto in advance of a Friday crypto summit. It’s not hard to understand why even some crypto and Trump backers see this as, to put it mildly, a conflict of interest that doesn’t make economic sense. Meantime, Commerce set up Elon Musk’s Starlink for billions in government contracts. OK, let’s just call this what it is: corruption.

Next week we can watch tech leaders bow and scrape anew in a meeting with Trump about tariffs.

Here’s all the news from this week:

AI and data: A tale of two agentic strategies

Analysis

Nadella vs. Benioff: The real story behind AI’s agentic future

AI’s trust problem: Can causal AI provide the answer?

How to convey generative AI product value with outcome-based pricing and messaging

Money matters

Anthropic raises $3.5B at $61.5B valuation to advance its AI research

Judge denies Musk’s attempt to block OpenAI from becoming for-profit entity

Defense technology startup Shield AI valued at $5.3B in $240M funding round

Quantexa reels in $175M for its data management platform

AI training data provider Turing closes $111M investment

OpenAI launches NextGenAI consortium with 15 research institutions and $50M in funding

Auxia lands $23.5M for personalized marketing platform

AI agent knowledge development platform LlamaIndex raises $19M

Momentic raises $3.7M to redefine software testing with AI

New models and services

Salesforce launches an AI agent skills marketplace with 200+ initial partners

Salesforce lets AI agents run in the background with Agentforce 2.5 launch

New Microsoft Sales Agents aim to automate tasks and improve deal management

Microsoft’s AI guru wants independence from OpenAI, developing own AI models (per The Information)

Google rolls out Gemini 2.0, AI Mode to its search engine

Google Cloud debuts powerful new AI capabilities for data scientists and doctors

Alibaba shares jump on new open-source QwQ-32B reasoning model

Amazon is developing its own AI ‘reasoning’ model (per Business Insider)

Sources: Larry Page has formed a new company, Dynatomics, to use LLMs to create highly optimized designs for various objects and then have a factory build them (per The Information)

GibberLink lets AI agents call each other in robo-language (per News) Yikes.

TigerGraph adds hybrid search capability to its graph database, releases free edition

Sonatype adds new tools to secure open-source AI and ML models in software supply chains

Open-source vector database Qdrant expands enterprise cloud AI features

Nexla enhances integration platform with agentic AI, no-code pipelines and data marketplace

Tavus introduces family of AI models to power real-time human face-to-face interaction

Policy

Scale AI faces probe amid allegations that it’s underpaying its data labeling contractors

There’s even more AI and big data news on News

Around the enterprise: CHIPS Act in disarray

Top news

Trump administration reportedly fires dozens of staffers from CHIPS Act office And even worse: Trump calls on lawmakers to scrap CHIPS Act in congressional address Why he’s against a bipartisan act that means thousands of U.S. jobs and a more secure domestic supply of chips is… inexplicable. And it would be a vanishingly small savings next to the overall federal budget — but of course, savings isn’t the point of any of this. It’s consolidating power to him and his wealthy friends.

Former Intel CEO Craig Barrett: Intel is back — stop talking about breaking it up When Barrett speaks, which isn’t often, he’s worth listening to. He’s not alone in this view either. I do agree with him that much of the board is worse than useless, even if it might be too late for Intel to keep going as is.

Coverage from MWC25:

ServiceNow’s newest AI agents bring intelligent automation to telecommunications firms

Broadcom hopes converged network appliance will ease 5G struggles

Cisco provides a dose of service provider innovation at MWC 2025

A survey of some interesting startups from Intellyx’s Jason Bloomberg: Discovering disruption at the MWC25 mobile world congress

Money matters

TSMC to invest $100B more in US chip plants

GPU cloud operator CoreWeave files to go public

IPO-bound CoreWeave to buy AI developer Weights & Biases for a reported $1.4B

Armed with new funding, Axelera AI debuts Titania, its latest low-power chip for edge AI inference

Cloudsmith secures $23M for its artifact management platform

Earnings: a mixed bag but clearly investors are nervous

Broadcom’s stock bounces back on strong earnings and guidance powered by AI chip demand

HPE to lay off 2,500 staff as stock craters on mixed earnings results and tariffs

AI chipmaker Marvell’s stock tumbles after-hours, despite earnings and revenue beat

MongoDB finally turns a profit but its shares plunge on weak guidance

GitLab swings to a profit as it beats expectations, but its guidance is a little light

Box’s stock falls as executives warn of foreign exchange hit on profits

Samsara sees shares dip despite topping earnings and revenue estimates

Domo beats earnings estimates, shares rise on strong guidance

Ups and downs on the cyber front:

Okta stock rockets as it reports fourth-quarter revenue growth and improved earnings guidance

CrowdStrike shares slide after strong earnings, slight guidance miss

Zscaler posts strong earnings and revenue beats, driving share gains

New services

AWS debuts GameLift Streams service that allows developers to stream games to any device

We have plenty more news on cloud, infrastructure and apps

Cyber beat: AI to the rescue

New services

JFrog advances AI security with Hugging Face partnership, Nvidia NIM and new MLOps platform

Penguin Solutions revamps its software to automate mass-scale AI infrastructure deployments

BreachRx launches Rex AI to streamline enterprise incident response workflows

Google enhances Chrome Enterprise with improved work and personal profile separation

Rubrik expands cyber resilience features to strengthen protection across cloud and enterprise workflows

Analysis

How AI and security are reshaping DevSecOps and DevOps tooling

Money matters

SolarWinds to acquire incident management platform startup Squadcast

Armis strengthens OT and IoT security with OTORIO acquisition

SpecterOps raises $75M to expand identity attack path security platform

Crogl raises $25M and launches knowledge engine to scale up enterprise security

Knostic raises $11M to strengthen enterprise AI security with need-to-know access controls

AIceberg introduces new AI trust platform with $10M in new funding

Aryon Security launches with $9M in funding to address cloud misconfiguration risks

Attack & response

Justice Department indicts Chinese officials and contractors over cyber intrusion campaign

More cybersecurity news here

Elsewhere in tech: Trump goes full crypto

Trump announces US strategic cryptocurrency reserve featuring bitcoin and Ethereum — now by executive order: Digital Fort Knox: Trump signs executive order for US strategic bitcoin reserve It’s hard to see what purpose it serves to have the government invest in crypto that doesn’t involve Trump insiders making bank on volatile coins. Or Trump himself. Some people such as Kelsey Hightower are not impressed and neither are a fair number of crypto fans. The only saving grace is that the government apparently won’t be buying bitcoin on the open market, only stockpiling forfeited crypto — but that’s a little fuzzy.

Elon Musk’s DOGE shuts down the GSA’s technology unit

More Elon grift: Commerce to Overhaul ‘Internet for All’ Plan, Expanding Starlink Funding Prospects

DoubleZero raises $28M to build global fiber network for blockchains

QuantWare raises €20M to scale quantum processors for next-gen computing

Utah passes controversial age-verification bill for app stores

Blast from the past: The pioneering social platform Digg will get a revival, with a dose of AI, courtesy of founder Kevin Rose and Reddit founder Alexis Ohanion.

And check out more news on emerging tech, blockchain and crypto and policy

Comings and goings

Amazon‘s Swami Sivasubramanian to lead new group focused on AI agents

Docker named former Oracle and Salesforce exec Mark Cavage president and chief operating officer.

General Motors hired its first AI chief: former Cisco and Google exec Barak Turovsky.

Data unification and management company Reltio appointed Don Bulmer chief marketing officer.

GitLab hired Ian Steward as its new chief revenue officer, replacing interim CRO Ashley Kramer, who will continue to serve as chief marketing and strategy officer.

Cloud provider Leaseweb Global appointed Svenja de Vos and Lex Boost as co-CEOs. Founder and now former CEO Con Zwinkels and Chief Financial Officer Pieter Dijkhuis take on “supervisory” roles. Martijn Bethlehem is new CFO.

Information management company OpenText appointed former Kaseya and Datto exec Mike DePalma as its new VP of business development (per CRN).

Mobile endpoint detection and response firm iVerify picked Apple alum Mike Rosen as chief information security officer.

Sachin Dev Duggal, founder of Builder.ai, which uses AI to develop apps and websites, stepped down as CEO.

What’s coming

Monday, March 10: Trump will meet with tech CEOs as tariff pressures set in

Earnings:

Monday, March 10: Oracle, Asana

Wednesday, March 12: UiPath, Adobe, SentinelOne

Thursday, March 13: DocuSign, PagerDuty

Image: News/Ideogram