DeepSeek? Who’s that? The Chinese cheap artificial intelligence model maker was supposed to cool investor interest in money-burning AI startups, but that was hardly the case this week.
If anything, the AI wars are heating up even more, with a hot new model from Elon Musk’s xAI, the launch of former OpenAI Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati’s new startup Thinking Machines Lab, Ilia Sutskever’s startup Safer Superintelligence raising $1 billion, and a whole lot of industry-focused AI startups raising rounds of up to $100 million each. OOh, and OpenAI reached 400 million active weekly users.
Vultures are circling Intel, which looks to be selling body parts such as Altera and Intel Capital — even if, as Dave wrote, there’s only one logical path and that’s offloading its chip manufacturing foundry operation. Former Intel engineering ace and current Tenstorrent CEO Jim Keller thinks Intel would be selling very low, especially if the design side is actually in play.
Is quantum computing closer than we think? Microsoft’s new Majorana quantum chip, or plans for it, made some investors think so, but it still seems doubtful.
Investors are betting most enterprises are going to want to have someone else take care of the AI heavy lift, which explains why cloud AI inference platform Lambda raised $480 million more and Together AI raised $305 million more.
Consolidation in the cybersecurity business still seems to be heating up, but so is funding for hot startups such as Dream.
Just in case you’re thinking there’s anything good about Elon Musk rooting around the government, understand that the claims of saving money are largely bogus. Looks like his young band of techies can’t do math very well. But then, anyone watching even a little closely realizes it’s not about cost-cutting. Whatever Elon’s kids are doing, you can be sure it’s to Elon’s and Trump’s benefit, not ours.
The big news to watch next week, besides whatever new madness happens on the political front, is Nvidia earnings, whose stock actually was knocked for a loop by DeepSeek. Also on the docket are big names such Snowflake, Salesforce, Workday, Dell, HP and more.
You can hear more about this and other news in a special theCUBE Pod, with John Furrier and Dave Vellante, recorded live from the New York Stock Exchange at the official opening of our studio there. Lots more coming from NYC from theCUBE and News.
Here’s all the news from this week:
AI and data: Musk, Murati and millions of dollars
Headline news
Elon Musk’s xAI unveils Grok-3 with advanced reasoning capabilities
Former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati launches Thinking Machines Lab
Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence reportedly raising $1B+ on $30B valuation
OpenAI reaches 400M weekly active users, doubles enterprise customer base
New models and services
Vast Data’s DataStore adds block storage and event streaming to support every kind of workload
IBM Consulting offers enterprises an easier path to agentic AI
Google researchers develop AI co-scientist based on Gemini 2.0
Google expands availability of Deep Research, an AI tool that wades deep into any topic
Microsoft debuts Magma, an AI model for software interfaces and robotic systems
Nvidia uses AI to release Signs, a sign language teaching platform
Decentralized protocol leaders join forces to launch HumanAIx AI infrastructure alliance
Enso launches AI agent marketplace in partnership with LangChain
Box makes it easier for customers to track AI spending, and adds new agentic AI capabilities
RingCentral debuts AI phone agent for automating business calls
Crunchbase relaunches as an AI-powered platform for predictive market insights
Securiti and Databricks partner to ease AI application development
Money matters
HP to acquire assets from ‘Ai Pin’ maker Humane in $116M deal
AI recruiting startup Mercor nabs $100M investment at $2B valuation
Marketing analytics startup Hightouch reels in $80M at $1.2B valuation
Baseten grabs $75M to crank up high-performance inference for AI workloads
OpenEvidence raises $75M to become the ChatGPT for doctors
British legaltech startup Luminance raises $75M for contract AI assistant
Augury raises $75M for AI-driven industrial equipment health and repair process optimization
Sanas gets $65M in funding to expand its real-time accent translation software
Sonar buys AutoCodeRover to enhance its code quality tools with autonomous AI agents
Spore.Bio raises $23M to cut microbiology testing to minutes from days using AI
Singulr AI launches with $10M in funding to secure enterprise AI adoption
Sawmills raises $10M to cut down observability data costs with AI
Policy
South Korea pauses DeepSeek downloads over privacy concerns
There’s even more AI and big data news on News
Around the enterprise: Intel’s uncertain future
Why Intel must stay independent, spin out its foundry and rebuild its iconic brand
Report: Broadcom and TSMC in talks to carve up Intel And that made Intel shares pop 10% a few days later.
Meantime: Silver Lake set to buy majority stake in Intel’s Altera programmable chip business
Cloud and AI in 2025: Five trends shaping the future of application development
The foundations of America’s prosperity are being dismantled (per MIT Technology Review) Very depressing. You’d think a tech leader such as Elon Musk would know better, but it’s clear he’s in this administration for short-term benefit to himself.
Amazon to stop support for communications service Chime next year
Money matters
AI infrastructure startup Lambda closes $480M investment
Together AI raises $305M for its AI-optimized public cloud
RISC-V chip startup AheadComputing raises $21.5M to fix CPU bottlenecks
Earnings:
Arista Networks’ growth accelerates, driven by big AI investments
Appian stock surges on strong quarterly results and better-than-expected outlook
Cadence reports strong revenue growth but 2025 forecast disappoints investors
Amplitude jumps on upbeat 2025 earnings forecast, brokerages raise rating
Akamai reports quarterly revenue increase but guidance misses forecast
Dropbox’s stock slides on weak forecast and stalled customer acquisition
Strong earnings and revenue beat fires up Five9’s stock
RingCentral revenue in line but quarterly revenue guidance misses mark
Rivian reports first-ever positive gross profit in fourth quarter
Block falls short on Q4 estimates with lower-than-expected earnings
We have plenty more news on cloud, infrastructure and apps
Cyber beat: Startups and the companies that buy them
Money matters
AI-driven critical infrastructure cybersecurity startup Dream raises $100M at $1.1B valuation
Menlo Security acquires Votiro to strengthen zero-trust file and data security
Deepwatch acquires security intelligence firm Dassana to strengthen AI-powered cyber resilience
Cloud-based physical security firm Verkada raises $200M late-stage round
Gomboc AI secures $13M to tackle cloud security backlogs with deterministic AI
Attack & response
Google report warns of Russian threat groups targeting Signal Messenger
New report warns of growing threat of mobile phishing targeting SMS and messaging apps
CISA and FBI warns Ghost ransomware is targeting critical infrastructure and businesses
New services
Aryaka introduces AI>Observe for real-time threat detection and network visibility
OpenText unveils new AI-driven solution to strengthen insider threat detection
Pangea expands AI security offerings with AI Guard and Prompt Guard
Palo Alto Networks ups the security ante with new Cortex Cloud
CardinalOps expands Threat Exposure Management platform with unified prevention and detection tools
More cybersecurity news here
Elsewhere in tech: Microsoft’s quantum leap?
Microsoft debuts groundbreaking Majorana 1 quantum chip with topological qubits
Amazon surpasses Walmart in quarterly revenue for the first time
Trump Media and Rumble sue Brazil Supreme Court justice in censorship row
Ambient IoT Alliance launches with Intel and Qualcomm
FCC launches probe into censorship on Big Tech platforms Yeesh. Don’t these whiners know they won the damn elections? This is authoritarian bigfooting, pure and simple.
And check out more news on emerging tech, blockchain and crypto and policy
Comings and goings
Cellular IoT firm Aeris named former Microsoft, Splunk and Sage exec Aziz Benmalek CEO.
Google AI researcher and Fellow Wu Yongui, joined TikTok owner ByteDance to do foundational AI research, reporting to CEO Liang Rubo.
Hoan Ton-That, CEO of controversial facial recognition startup Clearview AI, has resigned. Early investor Hal Lambert and co-founder Richard Schwartz are now co-CEOs.
Customer experience firm Five9 said Chief Financial Officer Barry Zwarenstein resigned, replaced by Bryan Lee as interim CFO.
RingCentral appointed Kira Makagon president and chief operating officer. She was chief innovation officer and chief marketing officer.
Data center firm Stack Infrastructure named Matt VanderZanden president.
What’s next: All eyes on Nvidia
Monday, Feb. 24: Zoom
Tuesday, Feb. 25: DigitalOcean, Workday, Couchbase
Wednesday, Feb. 26: Nvidia, Snowflake, Nutanix, Pure Storage, Salesforce, C3.ai, Synopsys, IonQ
Thursday, Feb. 27: Dell, HP, NetApp, Elastic, Autodesk, Expensify, Duolingo
Image: News/Ideogram
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