Investors can’t get enough of OpenAI and Databricks – Oracle, not so much – News

The artificial intelligence money scramble continues all the way into the end of the year, as OpenAI may raise $10 billion from Amazon, perhaps part of as much as $100 billion from a range of investors, at a valuation of $750 billion.

And Databricks is doing a $4 billion Series L round — first time I’ve heard of that — at a $134 billion valuation. Whew.

At the same time, Oracle spooked the stock market with a partner switcheroo on its $10 billion Michigan data center project. But if data center backers are getting a little wary, it’s not showing up in less demand yet — Micron crushed its earnings as buyers can’t get enough of its high-bandwidth memory chips for AI systems.

The coming year-end also hasn’t slowed down the AI model race, as Google again weighed in with a well-received new lightweight Gemini model and OpenAI struck right back with a new image generation model. Even Nvidia weighed in with a set of Nemotron models for AI agents.

ServiceNow reportedly is in talks to buy cybersecurity firm Armis for $7 billion, though investors think it could be overreaching and nicked the stock after word got out.

Nuclear power keeps heating as energy demands from AI data centers skyrocket. Radiant Industries raised $300 million in a bid to make mass-produced nuclear reactors a reality, and even President Trump is trying to get into the game with an odd merger of Trump Social’s parent company with a fusion power company.

It’s not clear why Alphabet really needs the outside money, but reportedly its Waymo self-driving car subsidiary is looking at raising $15 billion at a $110 billion valuation.

AI shakeup at Amazon: Top cloud infrastructure exec Peter DeSantis will lead a new organization combining its Nova and AI model research teams with custom silicon and quantum computing, as AI chief Rohit Prasad leaves at year-end.

Dave Vellante gave himself a B- for his 2025 enterprise tech predictions. In January, he’ll offer up his 2026 predictions.

Here’s all the enterprise and emerging tech news and analysis this past week from News and beyond:

AI and data: OpenAI’s big Amazon deal

Analysis and food for thought

Breaking Analysis: Grading our 2025 enterprise technology predictions

“I was forced to use AI until the day I was laid off.” Copywriters reveal how AI has decimated their industry (per Brian Merchant at Blood in the Machine)

Merriam-Webster names ‘slop’ the word of the year

Money matters

OpenAI reportedly could raise $10B+ in funding from Amazon

Databricks raises $4B+ at $134B valuation to build new AI features

Oracle spooks the stock market after key partner refuses to fund $10B Michigan data center project

Meta’s Yann LeCun targets $3.5B valuation for new AI startup (per Financial Times)

Nvidia acquires Slurm developer SchedMD to enhance its software capabilities

Cursor acquires AI code review startup Graphite

AI coding startup Lovable raises $330M round backed by Nvidia, other tech heavyweights

AI agent and world model startup General Intuition is in late-stage talks to raise several hundred million dollars at $2B+ valuation (per Alex Heath at Sources)

AI medical research startup Chai Discovery raises $130M in funding

AI-aided design software startup Neural Concept raises $100M to accelerate product engineering

AI-native trucking insurance startup Nirvana Tech bags $100M late-stage round

Call center chatbot startup PolyAI raises $86M at a $750M valuation

AtScale raises funding round led by Snowflake Ventures

Edison Scientific raises $70M to build autonomous AI scientists for research

Audio generation startup Mirelo nabs $41M investment

Ankar raises $20M to expand AI-powered patent operating system

Endra secures $20M to automate mechanical, electrical and plumbing design for construction

New models and services

Google’s Gemini 3 Flash makes a big splash with faster responsiveness and superior reasoning

OpenAI’s GPT-5.2-Codex advances software engineering with better reasoning and context understanding

OpenAI launches new GPT Image 1.5 model optimized for image editing

Nvidia launches Nemotron 3 model family as open foundation for agentic AI systems

Analysis from Zeus Kerravala: Analysis: Nvidia Nemotron-3 open models lead to more efficient agentic AI

Google works to erode Nvidia’s software advantage with Meta’s help on PyTorch (per Reuters)

Allen Institute for AI introduces Molmo 2, bringing open video understanding to AI systems

Bioptomus announces universal ‘biology world model’ for biomedical research

Adobe Firefly’s newest update enables users to direct, rather than generate, AI video

Meta Platforms transforms audio editing with prompt-based sound separation

Google tests CC AI agent to summarize email, calendars and documents

Anthropic makes agent Skills an open standard

Patronus AI’s debuts Generative Simulators to support continuous evolution and improvement of AI agents

Zencoder’s Zenflow gets LLMs to verify each other’s work and accelerate AI code automation

Retell AI targets human bottlenecks in agentic voice AI with automated QA

Zoom rolls out AI Companion 3.0 with browser access and agentic automation

Chatbot visibility startup geoSurge launches to help brands get noticed by ChatGPT

DuploCloud launches AI DevOps Engineers that execute real infrastructure work

Around the enterprise: Nukes get hot

Money matters

Palo Alto Networks inks multibillion-dollar AI deal with Google Cloud

Radiant raises $300M to make mass-produced nuclear reactors a reality

Micron crushes expectations on earnings and guidance amid soaring AI memory demand

Coursera announces acquisition of Udemy in AI education bid

Compute-in-memory chip startup Mythic raises $125M round

BlackBerry beats earnings expectations as shares swing after-hours

New products and services

Docker makes its entire catalog of security-hardened container images free for everyone

Nutanix broadens sovereign cloud support

Exclusive: SanDisk open-sources technique to speed testing of ultra-high-capacity SSDs

Amazon’s Just Walk Out just walks out new use cases

Samsung debuts world’s first two-nanometer mobile processor

Policy

Trump is recruiting tech personnel for government Tech Force

Trump administration takes aim at EU over treatment of US tech giants

Cyber beat: ServiceNow bulks up — too much?

Money matters

ServiceNow reportedly in advanced talks to buy Armis for up to $7 billion Investors appear not to like the idea, however, as its stock fell almost 12% on Monday.

Red Hat acquires AI security startup Chatterbox Labs

Cyderes acquires Lucidum to strengthen identity-aware security data foundation

Exein closes €100M round to harden security in internet of things devices

Adaptive Security raises $81M to expand AI-driven social engineering defense platform

Vulnerability-free container image startup Echo Software raises $35M

Dux launches with $9M seed round to tackle AI-driven cyber exposure

Attack & response

ShinyHunters claims theft of Pornhub Premium user data in extortion attempt

NIST releases draft AI cybersecurity framework profile to guide secure AI adoption

Fastly report finds bot traffic now makes up nearly a third of all web requests

Palo Alto Networks warns that AI is driving a surge in cloud security risks

Cyata flags agentic AI supply-chain risk in Cursor remote code execution bug

Cloudflare on the top internet trends: AI bots, post-quantum adoption and DDoS campaigns

NCC Group report finds ransomware activity plateaued in November as tactics evolve

New services

Falcon AI Detection and Response expands CrowdStrike platform to protect AI interactions

Fortinet brings FortiGate-VM security to Nvidia BlueField-3 for AI factories

Vectra AI targets hybrid attack gaps with unified control framework

Sonar adds architecture controls to keep fast-growing codebases structurally sound

Human Security brings cryptographic verification to Amazon Bedrock agents

1Password integrates with Cursor to secure AI-driven development workflows

Elsewhere in tech: Waymo weighs way-big funding

Trump Media to merge with fusion energy startup TAE in $6B all-stock deal

Waymo reportedly seeking to raise $15B+ at $110B valuation

TikTok just signed the deal to hand US operations to Oracle-led investor group

Lidar maker Luminar files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and lines up $110M asset sale

Vital Lyfe raises $24M in funding to make any kind of water source clean enough to drink

Warner rejects Paramount’s hostile bid, saying Netflix deal still superior

Comings and goings

Twenty-seven-year Amazon veteran Peter DeSantis, its top cloud infrastructure exec, will lead a new organization combining its Nova and AI model research teams with custom silicon and quantum computing. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced the move as Rohit Prasad, who has led the company’s AI initiatives leaves by year-end. AI researcher Pieter Abbeel, who joined the company last year as part of Amazon’s hiring of the founders of robotics startup Covariant, will lead the frontier model research team within Amazon’s AGI organization, while continuing his work with the company’s robotics team.

Customer experience platform Five9 appointed former Nintex CEO Amit Mathradas its new CEO.

OpenAI hired Google‘s Albert Lee to lead corporate development, a job he did for Google Cloud and Google DeepMind (per CNBC).

Mozilla appointed Anthony Enzor-DeMeo CEO, succeeding Laura Chambers, who was interim CEO for the past two years.

CIQ, the firm behind Rocky Linux, promoted Chief Operating Officer Bjorn Hovland to president.

Former AppsFlyer and JFrog exec Ori Yitzhaki joined code review and verification firm Sonar as chief product officer.

Graylog, a provider of security information and event management and log management solutions, has a new chief financial officer: longtime industry CFO Jorda (Jody) Cire.

Thrive Capital’s Thrive Holdings subsidiary hired Palantir CIO Jim Siders as CEO of Shield Technology Partners (per CNBC).

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