Nvidia comes through again, as AI dominates Microsoft Ignite and SC24 – News

The king of artificial intelligence came through.

Despite sky-high expectations, Nvidia Wednesday managed to outdo earnings expectations as it nearly doubled revenue from a year ago and more than doubled its profit. Investors more or less liked what CEO Jensen Huang (pictured) told them about the future too, as they bid up the stock almost a point on confidence that its new Blackwell graphics processing unit is poised for takeoff after months of delays and worries about their overheating in data centers. AI also boosted the fortunes of big-data giant Snowflake, whose earnings beat and new deal with Anthropic sent its stock up almost 33% Thursday.

AI dominated two major conference this week, too. At its Ignite conference, Microsoft was only too happy to ride the AI train, taking Copilots into every nook and cranny of the enterprise. At the SC24 supercomputing conference, it was all about AI as well, because of course it is, since AI sucks up all available computing power.

In other AI news, Amazon announced it will invest another $4 billion in Anthropic, which will make Amazon Web Services its primary AI training partner, and it’s already working with Amazon’s chip design unit Annapurna Labs on new Trainium AI chips.

The Justice Department asked federal judge to order that Google sell its Chrome browser. If it happens, that will be a very big deal, but at best it will take years in court, and even then, who’s going to buy it and what will they do with it that will change the search market, which is the issue? Far from clear.

Cloudbrink, a company you probably haven’t heard of, tried to bury our story a year ago on a lawsuit filed by a co-founder against the company that charged financial fraud, hiring a firm to clean up its online image and make it look like our story was plagiarizing another story. Not so, of course, and we sent writer Mark Albertson to take a deep dive into the secretive field of reputation management — and got Google to rescind a DMCA takedown of the original story. Check out what he found.

In the never-ending quest to become one of the few dominant cybersecurity platforms, Wiz this week acquired Dazz for $450 million. And it’s not alone, as Palo Alto Networks continues to push “platformization” and Cyera this week netted $300 million more in funding to try to be a “consolidator of data security.”

Next week, earnings will be up from Zoom, Dell, HP, Nutanix, Workday, CrowdStrike, Autodesk and PagerDuty. And just around the corner is AWS re:Invent, the big annual conference in Las Vegas, Dec. 2-6, when we’ll have all hands on deck for all the news, interviews and analysis.

This and other news were topics of discussion by Dave Vellante and John Furrier in theCUBE Pod, already out this week in an early edition on YouTube. And look for Vellante’s weekly deep dive, Breaking Analysis, early next week.

Here are this week’s top news and analysis from News and beyond:

AI and data: AI gets lit at Microsoft Ignite

Top news and analysis

Nvidia posts another strong earnings beat as customers race to deploy next-gen Blackwell GPUs It doesn’t look like its dominance in AI is threatened a bit for the next few years, perhaps many years if it continues to execute.

Snowflake’s shares surge higher on blowout earnings, a promising acquisition and new AI partnership

Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic as part of AI, chip collaboration

Elon Musk’s xAI raises $5B at $50B valuation (per the WSJ)

Nvidia’s upcoming Blackwell GPUs overheat in server racks, worrying customers, reports say

And it was all about AI at Microsoft Ignite, no surprise:

Copilots will be everywhere in Microsoft Ignite announcement spree

Microsoft’s Azure AI Foundry unifies AI development so everyone can get involved

Microsoft brings developers new tools for AI models and agents at Ignite 2024

Microsoft cranks up its AI infrastructure offerings with new VMs, cooling and power delivery tech

Microsoft expands Windows security and announces new proactive defense measures at Ignite 2024

Microsoft partners with Atom Computing to launch commercial quantum computer

Oracle expands integration with Microsoft Azure infrastructure

Informatica expands support for AI and Microsoft Fabric on Azure

Snowflake to broaden interoperability with Microsoft Dataverse and Dynamics

Dell boosts Azure AI storage and adds services to support Copilot+ PCs

MongoDB and Microsoft expand partnership to advance AI applications and data analytics

Networking, AI simplification and observability take center stage: theCUBE’s final Ignite 2024 analysis

New models and services

AWS App Studio launches in general availability, making everyone an app builder

Google Cloud introduces AI agent ecosystem program

Cerebras Systems upgrades its inference service with record performance for Meta’s largest LLM model

New updates give Mistral AI’s Le Chat an edge over ChatGPT

Chinese AI startup DeepSeek’s newest model surpasses OpenAI’s o1 in ‘reasoning’ tasks

LastMile AI’s AutoEval makes it simple to create customized evaluator models for testing generative AI

Zilliz debuts new release of its cloud-based vector database

Mitel brings AI to its multicloud contact experience offering

StarTree brings batch-like flexibility and performance to streaming data

Procore to add AI agents to its construction management software platform

Deloitte Digital unveils Agentforce accelerators with Salesforce and Anthropic for trustworthy LLM use cases in regulated industries

Quantization, a widely used technique to make AI models more efficient, has limits — and the industry could be fast approaching them (per News)

Money matters

Databricks is reportedly now looking to raise up to $8 billion to cash out employees. This drip-drip-drip is getting kind of ridiculous. As Alex Wilhelm put it, “Just fucking go public.”

Google’s $2 billion Anthropic investment gets UK antitrust clearance

Enveda Biosciences raises $130M to advance AI-driven drug discovery from natural compounds

AI chip startup MatX reportedly raises $80M funding round

Graph database firm Neo4j chose the 12th paragraph of a release noting its $200 million annualized revenue run rate to reveal it recently raised $50M at a $2B-plus valuation from Noteus Partners.

Lightning AI raises $50M to eliminate AI development headaches

Vision AI training and deployment startup Roboflow raises $40M

SuperAnnotate announces $36M Series B backed by Socium Ventures, Nvidia, Databricks and others

Selector Software raises $33M funding round to fix network outages with AI

Wordware raises $30M to reimagine AI development as ordinary writing

BrightAI raises $15M for its AI-powered infrastructure optimization platform

Industrial AI startup Juna.ai raises $7.5M in seed funding

Generative AI drug discovery hub Converge Bio raises $5.5M to understand the ‘language of biology’

Rabbit launches ‘teach mode,’ allowing people to create custom agents for its AI mobile device

There’s more AI and big data news on News

Around the enterprise: supercomputing for AI

Top news and analysis

Breaking Analysis: Cloud market share shows vendors eyeing a $1T opportunity

Justice Department asks federal judge to order that Google sell Chrome Isn’t AI going to scramble the search market anyway? And just Thursday came a report that OpenAI may do its own browser. Much of the big-tech antitrust action seems so performative, despite real concerns that might be better addressed than through yearslong battles. Not to mention, I’ve always thought that defining the search market as, well, mostly Google search, is misleading; why not include searches on Amazon and other sites? If I’m searching for a product, that’s where I go first, not Google, and I’m not alone. A restaurant? I end up quickly on Yelp, despite all its yelping about Google.

Cloud software company ServiceTitan files to go public on Nasdaq. Will that open the IPO floodgates? Probably not, but it’s a start.

Supermicro stock jumps as it files plan to avoid delisting

All about AI at SC24, too:
The era of clustered systems: What to watch at SC24

Scalable AI infrastructure reshaping data centers: theCUBE insights from SC24

Dell expands AI Factory with new high-powered servers and dense racks

Nvidia launches H200 NVL high-performance GPU to power AI supercomputing

Nvidia’s SC24 special address hints at a new era in computing and AI

AI hardware innovations redefine training and inference

More coverage and interviews and analysis from the supercomputing event

More new products and services

Google is reportedly rebuilding ChromeOS on Android as Chrome browser faces antitrust scrutiny

At KubeCon/CloudNativeCon 2024, AI hype gives way to real application concerns

OpenText broadly enhances customer experience cloud suite

Google unveils first developer preview for Android 16, starting a faster release cycle

Morpheus launches blockchain-based decentralized AI compute project

AI cloud provider Nebius announces first US GPU cluster in Missouri

Steg.AI launches web app to simplify digital content protection for enterprises

Money matters

API management company Kong raises $175M to provide connectivity for next-generation AI

Observability provider LogicMonitor raises $800M at $2.4B valuation

ERP provider Odoo valued at €5B in secondary sale

KKR leads $370M investment in hotel analytics provider Lighthouse

NetApp’s stock rises after raised profit and sales guidance, citing strong cloud storage demand

Elastic shares surge 16% as company beats quarterly earnings and revenue expectations

Enfabrica raises $115M as it debuts ‘world’s fastest’ GPU networking chip

Spectro Cloud nabs $75M for its Kubernetes management platform

Front acquires Idiomatic to bolster AI-driven customer service solutions

Aviz Networks raises $17M to advance AI-driven networking for data centers and edge

We have more news on cloud, infrastructure and apps

Cyber beat: What’s coming next year

Palo Alto Networks’ Nir Zuk on what’s coming in cybersecurity in 2025

Google identifies coordinated network of inauthentic news sites in Glassbridge investigation

Meta takes down millions of accounts related to ‘pig-butchering’ scams

Money matters

Palo Alto Networks delivers strong earnings results despite revenue shortfall

Wiz acquires cybersecurity startup Dazz for reported $450M

Cyera raises $300M on $3B valuation to advance AI-driven data security platform

Prompt Security secures $18M to enhance enterprise protection against generative AI risks

AI meets cybersecurity: Twine launches with $12M funding for digital cyber employees

New products and services

Microsoft integrates source-code analysis into its cloud security suite

Tanium introduces autonomous endpoint management to enhance IT and security operations

Akamai expands Guardicore Segmentation to AWS, enhances zero-trust network access solution

HP launches Enterprise Security Edition to strengthen business PC protection

More cybersecurity news here

Elsewhere in tech: Amazon and SpaceX vs. labor

Cloudbrink’s legal issues shine spotlight on growing field of reputation management

Accused of violating labor rights, Amazon and SpaceX attack US labor board in court

Meta is now letting users tinker with Instagram’s algorithm recommendation system

Google DeepMind’s AlphaQubit tackles quantum error detection with unprecedented accuracy

Portuguese AI drone startup Tekever raises €70 million to expand operations

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

Comings and goings

Meta hires Clara Shih, Salesforce’s just-departed CEO of AI, to lead a new business AI group, another foray into the enterprise.

Amazon hires former Microsoft and SAP exec Julia White as AWS chief marketing officer, replacing Raejeanne Skillern (per Geekwire)

Cloud security firm Sysdig appointed Bill Welch CEO. He was most recently president and chief operating officer of Talkdesk.

Nick Pickles, former policy chief at X, is joining Sam Altman’s world as chief policy officer.

What’s next

Events

Dec. 2-6: AWS re:Invent, Las Vegas and virtual. All hands on deck for news from News, where I and others will be in attendance, as well as theCUBE and analysts from theCUBE Research. They might need to rename it re:AInvent.

Earnings

Monday, Nov. 25: Zoom

Tuesday, Nov. 26: Dell, HP, Nutanix, Workday, CrowdStrike, Autodesk and PagerDuty

Photo: Robert Hof/ News