Damn the tariffs! Full speed ahead on AI! – News

Seemingly oblivious to the faltering economy, new artificial intelligence models kept coming fast and furious this week, especially from OpenAI — and apparently they’re pretty popular.

China’s DeepSeek? Not so much, at least with the U.S. government, as a House committee just labeled it a security threat.

In perhaps a sign that its massive funding is burning a hole in its pocket, OpenAI is also looking at creating a social network. Perhaps Sam Altman sees an opening, given that TikTok still faces having to shut down in the U.S. and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg tried and failed to pay off the FTC to drop its antitrust lawsuit this week, which could force it to unwind its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp. But honestly I don’t really get it any more than I get Elon Musk trying to goose Grok by connecting it to X.

IPOs surprisingly aren’t quite dead yet, as Figma filed confidentially this week and Kodiak Robotics said it will go public via a SPAC. But with Trump kicking the economy into a ditch, it’s hard to see any kind of IPO revival. Meanwhile, the tariff gyrations caused tech stocks to plunge again Wednesday, and the overall market fell Thursday too.

Nvidia is producing its latest-generation Blackwell AI chips in Arizona with TSMC, and it’s building AI supercomputers in Texas with Foxconn and Wistron — both no doubt in the works for years, even if Trump likely will try to take credit.

But that won’t help prevent more troubles from tariffs and other trade limitations, as Nvidia faces a $5.5 billion sales hit from limits on shipping its H20 chip to China. AMD also estimates an $800 million charge from U.S. restrictions on China trade, and ASML missed order expectations amid tariff uncertainty. And surely there’s more trouble coming. No wonder Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang just hopped on a plane to China to smooth things over with officials and local customers.

Private equity is staying busy as the stock market creates bargains and targets: Elliott Management has bought up $1.5 billion worth of HPE’s stock. Suffice to say, expect some changes ahead for HPE. Meantime, Intel sold 51% of Altera to Silverlake for $3.4 billion, at a valuation of $8.75 billion — a big haircut from its original acquisition price of $16.7 billion.

Google lost another antitrust case, this one on its ad tech offering. But Google will appeal and ad tech is 17% of its business, so the previous case declaring Google Search a monopoly, which awaits a judge’s remedies, remains the bigger deal. If government agencies can still work together in this day and age, it’s not a stretch that a deal involving both cases could happen in place of years of further litigation.

The critical CVE Program for tracking cybersecurity vulnerabilities got a last-minute funding reprieve, but it never should have come to this. It’s hard not to feel that we’re one more bad decision by the confederacy of clowns away from disaster.

Infrastructure is still getting some big fundraises: Hammerspace raised a hefty $100 million for its Linux-powered data management platform. And Auradine nabbed $153 million to develop bitcoin mining and AI networking hardware.

Tech earnings season gets underway in earnest next week with SAP, Tesla, IBM, ServiceNow, Check Point Software, Pegasystems, Intel and Alphabet. The results won’t be nearly as interesting as the outlooks, which surely won’t be robust.

Here’s all the news this week from News and beyond, which you can hear more about in John Furrier’s and Dave Vellante’s weekly podcast theCUBE Pod, up on YouTube now.

AI and data: OpenAI pours on the gas

Policy

China’s DeepSeek labeled national security threat in bipartisan House committee report

Opinion and analysis

Breaking Analysis: Google’s cloud play: integrated AI from infrastructure to apps

The efficiency trap: Why obsessing over AI productivity will destroy your engineering culture

New models and services

OpenAI launches o3 and o4-mini amid $3B Windsurf acquisition report

OpenAI launches new GPT-4.1 series of language models for developers

OpenAI doubles users to 800M-1B thanks to Ghibli-style image generation

OpenAI reportedly mulls launching a social network

Google launches Gemini 2.5 Flash in preview for developers

AI evaluation platform LMArena is becoming a real startup company

Wikipedia offers AI developers its article data on Kaggle to stop automated scraping

Anthropic adds research tool, Google Workspace integration to Claude

Cohere releases Embed 4: a multimodal AI model designed for agentic search

Exclusive: Corvic emerges from stealth, says it has a better way to organize data for AI training

Together AI enhancements make AI fine-tuning faster and easier

Amazon partners with GitLab to bring Q Developer to DevSecOps workflows

Monte Carlo puts AI agents to work on data reliability

Make launches AI agents to handle complex automations in real time

Deepgram’s Aura-2 is a high-performance text-to-speech engine built for business interactions

JetBrains launches Junie, its AI coding agent for developers

Google develops AI model to help researchers decode dolphin communication

VMware ups Tanzu’s gen AI support, sheds Kubernetes dependence

Gong debuts AI agents to supercharge business revenue operations

Docusign embeds AI at every step of the contract management process

Kyndryl wants to help enterprises leverage their most sensitive data in AI workloads

Tango releases AI-powered automation for browser-based workflows

Foundation EGI raises $7.6M to transform manufacturing with ‘engineering general intelligence’

Money matters

Hammerspace nabs $100M for its Linux-powered data management platform

Databricks buys feature engineering startup Fennel to enhance AI model development

Virtue AI raises $30M in funding for its AI safety tools

Bauplan raises $7.5M to automate data infrastructure as code for AI software developers

TheStage AI steps into the limelight after raising $4.5M to automate model fine-tuning

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

Around the enterprise: more winning in the Trump economy

Policy

Tech industry braces for fresh tariffs as Trump insists nobody is ‘getting off the hook’

Trump’s latest export controls rattle chipmakers and their stocks plunge

Nvidia faces $5.5B sales hit from new constraints on H20 chip exports to China

And so Jensen gets on a plane: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang visits Beijing following US chip export restrictions

Court rules against Google in advertising technology antitrust case

New products and services

Nvidia to mass-produce AI supercomputers in the US

Certinia enhances AI features across its services delivery software

Case study: Credit data powers Experian’s software transformation

Money matters

Figma files confidential IPO paperwork after failed Adobe acquisition

Intel to sell 51% stake in Altera to Silver Lake at $8.75B valuation

TSMC tops first-quarter expectations amid continued AI demand

Uh-oh: Elliott has built $1.5B+ stake In HPE (per Bloomberg)

Tapcheck taps investors for $225M to help employees get paid before payday

Lyft to acquire European mobility platform FreeNow for $197M

Auradine raises $153M to develop bitcoin mining and AI networking hardware

Doss raises $18M to accelerate AI-driven ERP development and global expansion

We have lots more news on cloud, infrastructure and apps

Cyber beat: Close call on vulnerability database

Policy

US extends contract to fund the CVE vulnerability database

A whistleblower’s disclosure details how DOGE may have taken sensitive labor data (per NPR)

Attack & response

IBM X-Force report finds shift from ransomware to credential theft in 2024

New services

Torq acquires unlaunched startup Revrod and expands AI-driven security automation in HyperSOC 2o

Cato Networks introduces controls to manage shadow AI use in enterprises

DataDome adds LLM detection and intent-based AI models to enhance fraud protection

Illumio launches AI-powered cloud detection and response solution

Vorlon launches DataMatrix to address software-as-a-service API visibility gaps

Security certificate lifespans to be reduced to 47 days by 2029 under new industry standard

Entrust launches unified platform for enterprise cryptographic security management

Operant AI introduces AI Gatekeeper for runtime protection across hybrid cloud environments

Money matters

Exaforce raises $75 million to scale agentic SOC platform with multi-model AI

Cy4Data Labs raises $10M to expand encrypted-in-use data security solution

NetRise raises $10M to expand software supply chain security platform

Pillar Security raises $9M to address growing AI-specific security risks

More cybersecurity news here

Elsewhere around tech: Zuckerberg tries to keep Meta whole

Mark Zuckerberg tried to negotiate settlement with FTC in landmark antitrust trial but failed

Metaverse platform Infinite Reality expands AI capabilities with $500M Touchcast acquisition

Apple reportedly preparing two new Vision Pro models to address price and performance issues

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

Comings and goings

Chris Krebs, a top cybersecurity official in Trump’s first term, resigned from SentinelOne to fight government probe (per the Wall Street Journal).

Ten-year Cisco Systems veteran Oliver Tuszik became its EVP of global sales, replacing former sales chief Gary Steele.

Cybersecurity firm Barracuda Networks appointed Ketan Tailor chief customer officer.

Dashlane named former Copado and Salesforce exec Joanna Chen chief information security officer.

Streaming data company Confluent promoted Ryan Mac Ban to chief revenue officer.

Vector database provider SingleStore promoted Nadeem Asghar to chief technology officer.

Spend management firm Medius announced a new CTO as well: John Seery, formerly with Creditsafe, Dun & Bradstreet and IBM.

What’s next

Tech earnings season gets underway. Look out below:

Tuesday, April 22: SAP, Tesla

Wednesday, April 23: IBM, ServiceNow, Check Point Software, Pegasystems

Thursday, April 24: Intel, Alphabet

Image: News/Ideogram