Musk mulls a megacorp as AI dealmaking shifts into overdrive – News

AI dealmaking hit overdrive this week, and it looks like it could stay in high gear for a long time to come.

For one, there’s Elon’s potential megacorp, which surely will have X somewhere in the name — maybe three Xs! By various reports, he’s looking at combining xAI, which owns X, the former Twitter, with SpaceX and going public, or maybe Tesla too. But let’s not get too excited yet. Investor Chamath Palihapitiya tweeted that Musk’s company could become “the Berkshire Hathaway of the modern century.” I haven’t met Warren Buffett, but I can assure you that Elon Musk is no Warren Buffett.

Meantime, will OpenAI and Anthropic ever raise enough money? Apparently not. Especially OpenAI, which is talking to Amazon, Nvidia, SoftBank, Microsoft — did I miss anyone? –about additional funding of up to $60 billion, or maybe more, and it’s even in the early stages of a possible IPO late this year. As for Anthropic, it’s looking at a $20 billion infusion from Sequoia Capital, Coatue and maybe Nvidia and Microsoft.

Even Apple’s in the deal game with an unusually large $2 billion AI acquisition of Q.ai indicates it’s looking at wearables as a prime place to make a stand in AI. Might not be a bad bet.

Of course, that’s if — and you’ve heard this before — AI doesn’t obliterate society, like, by next year. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei reiterated in a loooong essay that humanity probably isn’t ready for the AI onslaught. At some point we probably ought to start listening to these guys, given they know more than we do about what’s coming. Then again, they’re going full speed ahead anyway — check out all those AI model and agent launches below. Are you just a little worried? I’m a little worried.

Back on a bit firmer ground, Dave Vellante & Co. predict what’s coming in enterprise tech this year: maybe the year of AI payoff, but they also see headwinds for enterprise software-as-a-service stalwarts even as data gravity favors the likes of Snowflake, and continuing higher prices for hardware.

Indeed, the AI picks-and-shovels crowd is doing great, as Samsung, Sandisk, Western Digital, Seagate, ASML and others are selling lots of storage, chipmaking gear and more. But investors suddenly cooled Thursday on enterprise software names such as ServiceNow, SAP and Microsoft, which saw their shares fall despite pretty decent earnings and outlooks as worries that AI could provide customers alternatives to those hard-earned seats. (For the record, Vellante thinks established software companies should find their way through, not least because their software is still very sticky, and IBM escaped the bloodbath thanks to higher software sales.)

Amazon will lay off thousands more staff, supposedly not a quarterly thing, but we’ll see in about three months.

Despite signs that IPOs are on the upswing, investors are still a little cautious, as life insurance platform Ethos saw its shares sag 11% on their first day of trading.

There’s another big lineup of tech earnings next week among them Alphabet, Amazon, Qualcomm, Arm, AMD, Supermicro and Palantir.

Here’s all of this week’s enterprise and emerging tech news, speculation and analysis from News and beyond:

AI and data: AI dealmaking gone even wilder

Analysis and food for thought

Enterprise technology predictions: What’s coming in 2026

Anthropic CEO warns humanity may not be ready for advanced AI

Chilean community draws on human intelligence to highlight AI’s excessive thirst for water

Databricks reports finds surge in AI agent adoption despite governance bottlenecks

The pillars of a successful artificial intelligence strategy

Money matters

OpenAI, Anthropic reportedly raising billions of dollars in new funding And now, The Information says Amazon, Microsoft and Nvidia are in talks to invest $60B in OpenAI —  plus, OpenAI may be preparing for an IPO in the fourth quarter

Apple acquires AI startup Q.ai for reported $2B

Ricursive Intelligence nabs $300M to speed up chip design with AI

Decagon AI raises $250M at $4.5B valuation to scale AI concierge platform

Synthesia raises $200M at $4B valuation to build worker skills using AI avatars

C3.ai stock soars on Automation Anywhere merger speculation

Factify gets $73M in seed funding to replace antiquated PDF files with intelligent documents

Orbital raises $60M to modernize real estate law with AI

Summize raises $50 million to accelerate global expansion and advance AI contract intelligence

Flora raises $42M to unify generative AI design in a single platform

Datatruck raises $12M to scale AI-native operating system for long-haul trucking

Sentra.app raises $5M to build AI teammate to organize enterprise memory

New models and services

Google lets the browser take control with major updates to Gemini in Chrome

Google introduces Project Genie virtual world generator

Google DeepSeek open-sources AlphaGenome medical research model

Moonshot AI releases open-source Kimi K2.5 model with 1T parameters

Nvidia launches Earth-2 open AI weather forecast models and tools

Ai2 launches family of open-source AI developer agents that adapt to any codebase

Dynatrace Intelligence aims to advance autonomous software operations

South Korea’s SK Hynix to establish a special ‘AI company’ in the US

Pecan AI unveils a predictive agent that automates business forecasting

Lorikeet launches Coach: an analytics agent to perk up AI customer support

Teleport launches Agentic Identity Framework to secure AI agents in production

Assembled rolls out automated schedule generation for customer support

Virtue AI debuts AgentSuite platform to help enterprises secure AI agents

Policy

UK government to allow publishers to opt out of Google data scraping for AI Overview

Around the enterprise: Investors worry AI could tank enterprise software

Earnings

Microsoft’s stock declines after cloud growth dips below 40%

IBM stock soars after-hours on strong revenue performance

SAP tops estimates but cloud backlog miss rattles investors

Meta’s stock surges on strong earnings, revenue and bullish guidance

Apple posts record quarterly revenue driven by ‘staggering’ iPhone 17 demand, but investors shrug

ServiceNow’s stock slides on iffy subscription revenue forecast

Samsung’s profit triples, beating estimates as AI chip demand fuels memory shortage

Tesla earnings top estimates as Musk pivots company from cars to robots

Commvault shares hit two-year low after below-expectation revenue outlook

F5 shares jump after revenue and earnings beat in fiscal first quarter

Extreme Networks Q2 earnings and revenue surpass estimates

SK Hynix pops 5% as it doubles profit in 2025 driven by the AI memory shortage

Chipmaking equipment giant ASML surges 7% as AI boom fuels record orders and upbeat 2026 guidance

Texas Instruments’ stock rises on analog chip demand boost

Seagate beats earnings expectations amid strong AI data storage demand

Sandisk, Western Digital beat expectations as cloud and AI data center storage demand accelerates

Apple supplier STMicroelectronics flags improving chip sales

More money matters

Ethos shares slide 11% after life insurance platform debuts on Nasdaq

Nvidia buys $2B worth of CoreWeave’s stock to accelerate AI factory buildout

GPU cluster marketplace PaleBlueDot AI raises $150M at $1B valuation

Eliyan secures $50M from leading hyperscalers and AI infrastructure providers to accelerate scalable AI systems

Adaptive6 scores $28M in early funding to find and fix cloud cost inefficiencies

Army awards Salesforce $5.6B contract to accelerate military modernization

New products and services

Microsoft’s next-gen Maia 200 chip promises massive performance boost for AI workloads

Platform Engineering brings multicloud support to its formae infrastructure-as-code platform 

Cyber beat: Agents meet cybersecurity

New services

Cisco Foundation AI debuts agentic security tools to protect autonomous AI systems

AI is coming to an enterprise near you and Zscaler aims to secure it

Swimlane unleashes agentic AI fleet and agent builder for cybersecurity

Apiiro introduces Guardian Agent to secure AI-driven software development

Rein Security launches with a focus on real-time production application security

Ivanti expands Neurons platform with agentic AI and asset visibility upgrades

MIND launches DLP for Agentic AI to secure data used by autonomous systems

Abstract Security partners with Netskope to bring real-time detection into security data streams

Money matters

PwC expands Google Cloud alliance with $400M push into AI-driven security operations

Cloud security startup Upwind raises $250M funding round

Ex-Palantir engineer raises $40M for cyber startup Outtake, with backing from Microsoft CEO Nadella

Memcyco raises $37M to scale agentless digital risk protection platform

Mesh Security raises $12M to scale cybersecurity mesh execution platform

Attack & response

Ransomware pressure on healthcare remains high as ransom demands plunge, report says

Elsewhere in tech: Elon mulls a megacorp

Elon Musk reportedly considering merger between SpaceX and xAI, or maybe even Tesla

Quantum chipmaker IonQ to acquire fab operator SkyWater for $1.8B

Waabi raises $750M as Uber separately commits up to $250M for robotaxi partnership

Industrial robotics startup Vention reels in $110M funding round

RobCo nabs $100M to scale autonomous industrial robotics platform

Crypto payments startup Mesh raises $75M at $1B valuation

PitchBook forecasts cautious improvement for venture-backed IPOs in 2026

Social media giants head to court in landmark addiction trial

Comings and goings

Amazon lays off 16,000 employees to prioritize growth areas

Former longtime Microsoft exec Hayete Gallot has left Google Cloud after less than one-year as Google’s global president of customer experience (per CRN).

Enterprise information management firm OpenText has a new CEO: former IBM exec Ayman Antoun. He succeeds interim CEO James McGourlay, who will move to an unspecified role within the Executive Leadership Team. P. Thomas Jenkins, currently serving as OpenText’s executive chair and chief strategy officer, will return to the role of chair of the board.

Data resilience firm Veeam Software promoted Brandt Urban to chief business development officer and named Tony Colon chief customer officer and Michael Rau VP of worldwide partners.

What’s next

Earnings: Two more cloud giants, some chip heavyweights and more:

Monday, Feb. 2: Palantir, NXP Semiconductor

Tuesday, Feb. 3: PayPal, AMD, Supermicro

Wednesday, Feb. 4: Uber, Alphabet, Qualcomm, Arm, Tenable, Snap

Thursday, Feb. 5: Amazon, Fortinet, Netscout, Qualys, Synaptics, OpenText, Atlassian, GenDigital

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