It’s still frothy in AI, but memory chips are now the bottleneck – News

You know AI is still pretty frothy when a company with no product or even publicly stated plans for one gets a billion dollars from the likes of Sequoia and maybe Nvidia, Alphabet and Microsoft. But that’s what Ineffable Intelligence just did.

Fei-Fei Li also just raised a billion dollars for her World Labs, though it’s much further along with its physical AI models for robots and other applications. Meantime, OpenAI, in a class of its own, reportedly is finalizing a $100 billion raise at an $850 billion valuation.

Perhaps it’s no wonder that some investors are backing off from AI trades a bit, at least for the likes of Alphabet, Meta and Microsoft whose stocks have been lifted by their AI opportunities. But they have an alternative to hedge their bets: Apple, which is more decoupled from the Nasdaq than anytime in the past 20 years — which sure doesn’t say much about Apple’s position in AI.

And where is all the AI investment money going? To Nvidia, of course, but also to makers of memory chips. John Furrier says memory chips are the new bottleneck for AI systems, but that also means an unprecedented “supercycle” for memory-chip makers, a massive and incredibly rapid switch from computer chips as the key driver of chip industry revenue. And that’s already raking in big bucks for Samsung, Micron and others.

Anthropic keeps forging ahead, with a new version of its general-purpose computer-use Sonnet model and an enterprise AI deal with Infosys. But the Pentagon may bring the hammer down given Anthropic’s insistence that Claude doesn’t get used to create things like, say, Skynet.

OpenAI snatched OpenClaw founder Peter Steinberger out of the clutches of Meta, a big catch. But for its part, Meta remained resolute on the AI superintelligence push, pledging to buy buy millions of Nvidia’s next-generation Vera Rubin graphics processing units and a similar number of Grace central processing units.

Another piece from John Furrier raises an interesting wrinkle about the contest between OpenAI and Anthropic: Will OpenAI’s bet on owning the open control plane for AI agents, which it calls Frontier, win, or will it be Anthropic’s vertical integration starting with the agent itself? Don’t expect an answer yet, but the question suggests a way to watch the competition for the next few years.

Don’t miss theCUBE Research’s annual predictions for this year, which generally revolve around the imperative for enterprises to get some returns on their huge AI investments.

Palo Alto Networks kept pushing ahead on its platform push with the $400 million acquisition of Koi.

Next week’s packed earnings schedule includes Nvidia, Salesforce, Dell, Workday, HP, CoreWeave and more — when we’ll hear more about that memory-chip crunch.

Here’s all the enterprise and emerging tech news this week from News, theCUBE Research and beyond:

AI and data: The year of enterprise ROI

Analysis and food for thought

Insight from the bosses:

TheCUBE Research 2026 predictions: The year of enterprise ROI

The $380B orchestration bet: Understanding the ‘coding wedge’ as AI labs move beyond the model layer

Vertical software, are we cooked? Fintool co-founder and CEO Nicholas Bustamante answers in his analysis: Some of us are indeed cooked, but not quite as soon as investors fear.

Selling AI software isn’t as easy as it used to be (per the Wall Street Journal) Customers are taking longer to assess purchases.

Accenture combats AI refuseniks by linking promotions to log-ins (per Financial Times) Um, but if you have to hammer people to use AI, how useful is it for them, really? Nobody had to force us to use the internet, or even personal computers. Of course, AI is very useful, but it needs to be made a lot easier to use in an effective way for the rest of us.

AI’s big biosecurity blind spot (per Axios)

Money matters

World Labs closes $1B investment backed by Nvidia, AMD and Autodesk

New AI startup Ineffable Intelligence reportedly raising $1B funding round

DHS awards Palantir up to $1B to deploy AI and data analytics platforms

Legal AI startup Legora eyes $400M raise At $5B+ valuation (per Forbes)

AI agent reliability startup Temporal raises $300M in funding

Render raises $100M more for its AI-optimized cloud platform

Braintrust lands $80M funding round to become the observability layer for AI

ChipAgents secures $50M in funding to accelerate agentic chip design

AI field operations startup FYLD raises $41M to help build large-scale infrastructure

Network observability startup Selector reels in $32M

SurrealDB raises $23M to expand AI-native multimodel database

Agentic finance automation startup Stacks raises $23M in funding

With $20M in funding, Solid Data has a solid plan to improve the reliability of AI agents

Flexible agentic marketing startup Kana Intelligence scores $15M in seed funding

AI-powered software intelligence platform Adronite raises $5M

Autosana lands $3.2M to automate mobile and web UI testing with agentic AI

Policy

Pentagon officials threaten to blacklist Anthropic over its military chatbot policies

New models and services

Anthropic debuts Sonnet 4.6, a highly capable creative and coding AI model

Infosys and Anthropic announce collaboration to unlock AI value across regulated industries

Google introduces Gemini 3.1 Pro model for advanced reasoning tasks

Google launches Lyria 3 music generation model

Alibaba releases multimodal Qwen3.5 mixture of experts model

NIST launches AI Agent Standards Initiative as autonomous AI moves into production

Manus launches personal AI agents in Telegram, with more messaging apps to come

ThoughtSpot attacks cloud costs with integrated caching feature

Glean adds a bit more sheen to its enterprise AI assistant

WaveMaker bets on markup-first AI to tame enterprise app generation costs

Opkey launches Design Studio to automate enterprise cloud application discovery and design

Solink introduces AI Agents designed to act on video and business data in real time

Secure networking startup Tailscale launches identity-linked governance for AI tools and agents

Around the enterprise: Memory chips to the moon

Perspectives

The memory supercycle is here — and the AI funding frenzy is pouring fuel on it

IT budgets may be rising, but inflation is killing value, tech economist warns

Money matters

SAP rebrands Emarsys as Engagement Cloud with plans to expand into enterprise-wide orchestration

Cyber beat: Palo Alto Networks keeps platforming

Money matters

Palo Alto Networks acquires file security startup Koi for reported $400M

Cogent Security raises $42M to scale AI agents for enterprise vulnerability remediation

Venice Security launches with $33M to bring access management to the enterprise

VulnCheck raises $25M to expand real-time exploit intelligence platform

Attack & response

Dataminr warns cyber ‘mega-loss’ era has arrived as threat actor alerts jump 225%

Modern PDF platforms are becoming high-risk attack surfaces

Wallarm warns APIs are fueling AI-era breaches at machine speed

New services

Swimlane debuts AI SOC with agentic back end to tackle cybersecurity operations

Kyndryl launches Cyber Defense Operations Center to unify network and security operations

Abstract Security launches AI-Gen Composable SIEM for streaming-first security operations

Proofpoint rolls out revamped partner program targeting AI-driven security market

Checkmarx integrates Developer Assist into Kiro for real-time AI-powered code security

Elsewhere in tech:

New York reverses plans to allow robotaxis in major blow to Waymo

Quantum algorithms enhance network resilience in Classiq, Comcast, AMD trial

Quantum computing firm Infleqtion pops in first day as public company

Freeform reels in $67M for its GPU-supported 3D metal printing system

Construction robotics startup Sitegeist raises €4M to automate arduous concrete repair jobs

Spain launches probe into social media giants as European regulation starts to boil

Comings and goings

OpenAI hired OpenClaw founder Peter Steinberger in push toward autonomous agents.

OpenAI poached Instagram’s celebrity whisperer, Charles Porch, for newly created role as VP of global creative partnerships (per Vanity Fair).

There’s a new executive row at AI security platform Cyera, which appointed a new president: former dbt Labs President and COO Brandon Sweeney. It also added Shira Azran as chief legal officer and promoted Joseph Iantosca to CFO and Sharon Shaked to chief people officer.

API and AI connectivity firm Kong named Bruce Felt, most recently with Domo, chief financial officer.

Atlassian has a new CFO too: James Chuong, formerly CFO at LinkedIn.

And so does security training firm KnowBe4, which hired former Trellix CFO Yuneeb Khan in the same job.

What’s next

Events

Feb. 24-26: Vast Forward, Salt Lake City: TheCUBE will be onsite Feb. 25 with interviews and coverage.

Earnings

Monday, Feb. 23: Backblaze

Tuesday, Feb. 24: Digital Ocean, Workday, HP

Wednesday, Feb. 25: Snowflake, Nutanix, Pure Storage, Salesforce, C3 AI, IonQ, Zoom, Synopsys, Circle Internet

Thursday, Feb. 26: Dell, NetApp, Zscaler, CoreWeave, Elastic, Block, Autodesk, Expensify, Duolingo, Avepoint

Image: News/Reve