Rising AI tide lifts all cloud boats, but investors get more choosy – News

Nvidia kept pressing its advantage in AI chips this week at its first Washington, D.C.-based conference, marshaling a lot of friends in support of all its technologies, from HPE and Nokia to Samsung, which is teaming up to build an AI Megafactory for chip manufacturing and more.

To underscore that point, Nvidia’s market cap just hit $5 trillion — though CEO Jensen Huang says there’s no AI bubble. M-hm.

Meanwhile, Qualcomm is making a play to challenge Nvidia with its own AI server chips, but it’s clearly an uphill battle.

Still, AI funding continued apace, so investors are betting there’s likely to be more opportunity for awhile to come — though many of them may be left holding the bag for any overshoot.

The big three cloud providers aren’t facing any apparent overshoot yet, as all of them, as well as Facebook, clocked better-than-expected quarterly results this week. But investors split on which ones have the best chance of seizing the AI opportunity. Microsoft spooked investors who worry about how much it has to spend to seize the AI opportunity in coming years. Likewise, they didn’t like Meta’s rampant spending either.

But Alphabet did much better, as its cloud business rode the AI boom enough to offset capital spending concerns — and despite persistent worries that AI itself would tank its search traffic and its massive ad revenues, it’s managing to hold its own there too. AI also boosted Amazon and its AWS cloud unit, lifting its stock 10% after-hours Thursday thanks to the fastest cloud growth in several years.

Despite the quarterly upside, Amazon is laying off at least 14,000 people. Maybe its AI is doing better at improving “efficiency” than people might assume? The company itself says it’s just cutting excess layers, but it’s a sure bet CEO Andy Jassy can read the economy and the Trump tariffs that threaten his retail business.

OpenAI finally restructured, and the big point is that it paves the way for going public — which is exactly what it’s reportedly going to do, though not until at least next year. For its part, Microsoft got a $235 billion chunk of OpenAI in the deal.

Space is finally becoming a growth industry for more than just SpaceX and Blue Origin as entrepreneurs smell a big opportunity.

Another big week of earnings looms, including Arm, Qualcomm, AMD, Supermicro and Palantir among many others.

Here’s all the news, views and analysis this week from News and beyond:

AI and data: OpenAI eyes IPO

Analysis and food for thought

OpenAI says more than a million people a week show severe mental distress when talking to ChatGPT

Surviving the AI capex boom Sparkline Capital’s take is worth a full read, but among the worrisome points about the top-valuation companies spending all that cash: “We are also concerned that the AI boom is transforming the Magnificent 7 from asset-light to asset-heavy, given that asset-heavy firms have historically produced inferior returns. Unfortunately, Big Tech appears committed to this bitterly competitive and costly AI arms race. Given their large weight in stock indexes, this is problematic for many investors.”

Investors don’t think Nvidia is part of that problem, however, as its market capitalization just hit an unbelievable $5 trillion, a first for any company.

Ray Dalio sees a vast American underclass increasingly dependent on the top 1% — and AI could make it worse. Or actually, it already is. But I’d be willing to bet on seeing a story in the next couple of years about companies realizing they need to hire real people for many tasks they thought AI could eliminate.

Money matters

Newly completed OpenAI restructuring gives Microsoft $135B stake — and paves the way for an IPO: OpenAI reportedly planning 2026-2027 IPO at valuation of up to $1T

Mercor, the AI startup fueling ChatGPT’s expertise, now valued at $10B (per Wall Street Journal)

Nvidia reportedly investing up to $1B in software development AI model startup Poolside (per Bloomberg)

Fireworks AI raises $254M at $4B valuation to help enterprises with AI inference workloads

AI video startup Synthesia reportedly raises $200M at $4B valuation

Figma acquires AI design startup Weavy for reported $200M+

Legaltech AI startup Legora raises $150M at $1.8B valuation

Former OpenAI researchers launch Applied Compute with $80M in funding

CoreStory raises $32M to help companies modernize legacy code with AI

Site reliability engineering startup Wild Moose launches with $7M in funding

Socratix AI raises $4.1M to build autonomous coworkers for fraud and risk teams

New models and services

Microsoft 365 gets new agents for building apps, workflows and… more agents

IBM releases small open-source Granite 4 models for mobile devices and browsers

Grammarly transforms into AI-enabled productivity suite with Superhuman rebrand

Google rolls out Android AI-powered features and updates for developers

Adobe’s GenStudio gets a dose of agentic automation and integrates custom models

GitHub tackles vibe coding chaos with a control center for AI coding agents

Informatica puts AI agents at the heart of its data management strategy

Exclusive: Enterpret adds agents to its customer feedback analysis platform

Redpanda’s new agentic data plane supports secure, governed deployments of AI agents

Anomalo expands its platform with AIDA, an intelligent data analyst for the enterprise

Grammarly transforms into AI-enabled productivity suite with Superhuman rebrand

Opaque introduces confidential AI platform with end-to-end privacy and compliance guarantees

Policy

After deaths and lawsuits, Character.AI will ban teens from speaking to its chatbots

There’s even more AI and big data news on News

Around the enterprise: Clouds ride AI boom

Coverage from Nvidia’s GTC DC:

Inside Nvidia’s GTC DC announcements: From AI factories to quantum computers and 6G networks

And the full rundown from Zeus Kerravala: Nvidia GTC DC: The rise of AI factories and a push for US leadership

HPE and Nvidia collaborate to speed government and enterprise AI adoption

Nvidia invests $1B in Nokia as part of new wireless networking partnership

Red Hat tightens Nvidia ties with BlueField integration and native CUDA support

Xage extends zero trust to AI agents and data centers through Nvidia BlueField integration

Fortanix and Nvidia team up to enable confidential AI in healthcare, finance and government

TheCUBE and theCUBE Research have plenty more onsite interviews and analysis

Earnings

Rampant cloud growth propels Alphabet to $100B quarterly revenue milestone

Amazon’s stock jumps as AWS cloud growth accelerates

Microsoft’s stock falls on AI spending concerns and lack of clarity about OpenAI

Meta’s stock slides on AI bubble fears, as Zuckerberg calls for increased spending

Apple’s iPhone revenue misses expectations, but CEO Tim Cook promises an immediate turnaround

Cloudflare earnings results beat expectations with strong revenue and profit growth

ServiceNow stock rises on earnings and revenue beats, upbeat outlook

Samsung’s profit more than doubles, beating estimates as chip recovery gathers pace

NXP forecasts upbeat quarterly revenue on recovery in demand

Confluent shrugs off takeover reports with strong cloud growth, sending stock higher

F5 shares slide after upbeat quarter overshadowed by breach-related headwinds

Cadence Design Systems falls despite Q3 earnings beat

Cybersecurity stocks diverge as Commvault disappoints and Check Point surges on AI-driven results

PayPal stock soars on earnings, new OpenAI partnership

Nvidia-supplier SK Hynix third-quarter profit jumps 62% to a record high on AI-fueled memory demand

Seagate posts results ahead of estimates amid AI-fueled 160% rally

Extreme Networks shares drop 15%+ despite solid earnings report as profit margin falls

Flex beats Q2 earnings and revenue estimates

Tenable beats on Q3 revenue

Coinbase shares rise on strong quarterly results as trading volumes and revenue surge

Atlassian shares rise as cloud growth and AI adoption drive earnings beat

Twilio stock surges on Q3 earnings beat and strong guidance

Western Digital jumps as earnings and guidance top forecasts

Other money matters

AWS opens $11B Project Rainier data center campus built for Anthropic

Core Scientific shareholders dismiss $9B CoreWeave deal over valuation worries

Pat Gelsinger-backed Gloo seeking to raise up to $109M in IPO

Bending Spoons, fresh off its AOL deal, gets valued at $11.7 billion

Apple suppliers Skyworks, Qorvo agree to create $22B radio-chip giant

Intel in talks to acquire AI chip startup SambaNova (per Bloomberg)

Humain to invest $3B with Blackstone’s AirTrunk in Saudi data center campus

Corporate travel and expense platform Navan IPO tumbles 20% after debut under SEC shutdown workaround

Substrate raises $100M to do the impossible and reinvent the chipmaking industry

Startup xMEMS gets $21M to bring advanced thermal management to AI-powered gadgets

Policy

China to ease rare earth element restrictions, greenlight TikTok deal following Trump-Xi meeting

Australian regulator sues Microsoft over Microsoft 365 Copilot pricing notifications

Disruptions

Azure outage takes multiple Microsoft services, customer websites offline

AWS disruption prompts Snowflake to spotlight its cross-cloud recovery feature

New products and services

Qualcomm debuts AI200, AI250 data center AI chips And analysis from John Furrier: Qualcomm’s AI200 turns up the heat on Nvidia — and puts inference economics in the spotlight Still, many are skeptical, including Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Samsung and Nvidia to build an AI Megafactory to transform semiconductor manufacturing

Columnar launches to redefine data connectivity with Arrow-powered ADBC drivers

AMD, HPE to build two new supercomputers for the Energy Department

Arista Networks debuts next-gen platforms for AI data centers

DroneDeploy adds agentic AI and robotics enhancements to expand mapping and inspection

We have lots more news on cloud, infrastructure and apps

Cyber beat: Funding surge

Money matters

Cybersecurity funding surge continues with Sublime, ConductorOne and CyberRidge rounds

Reflectiz raises $22M to protect enterprise websites from third-party and open-source risks

Exclusive: Rilevera raises $3M to automate cyberthreat detection engineering

New products and services

OpenAI unveils Aardvark, an autonomous GPT-5 agent built to hunt software vulnerabilities

Palo Alto Networks introduces Prisma AIRS 2.0, Cortex Cloud 2.0 and AgentiX to secure the agentic enterprise

Nozomi Networks brings automated threat prevention to OT environments with Arc update

Commvault launches Conversational AI and Data Rooms to unify cyber resilience and responsible AI

SandboxAQ launches OpenCryptography.com to expose hidden cryptographic vulnerabilities

BreachRx launches Mobile Command app to empower executives during cyber incidents

Acronis Cyber Protect Local brings cloud-grade security to local and sovereign deployments

More cybersecurity news here

Elsewhere in tech: Tech launches into space

The space industry takes off: With lower launch costs and new tech, entrepreneurs envision a starship future

IBM unveils Digital Asset Haven to help banks and governments manage crypto securely

How AWS fuels Zoox’s autonomous robotaxis

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

Comings and goings

Report: Amazon to let go of up to 30,000 employees, starting this week

AI data firm People.ai appointed a new CEO: its former SVP of Marketing and Strategy Jason Ambrose.

Vector Capital Management named Apratim Purakayastha, former general manager of Talent Development Solutions at Skillsoft, CEO following the completion of its acquisition of AI revenue enablement firm Showpad.

What’s next

Events

Nov. 4-5: Celonis Celosphere, Munich: TheCUBE will be onsite with interviews and analysis.

Earnings: Yet another big week

Monday, Nov. 3: Palantir, RingCentral

Tuesday, Nov. 4: Uber, AMD, Supermicro, Astera Labs, Arista, Kyndryl, Rapid7, Rivian

Wednesday, Nov. 5: Digital Ocean, Dynatrace, Arm, Qualcomm, Informatica, Fortinet, Snap, Robinhood, Lyft, OpenText, Freshworks, Hubspot, Fastly, Duolingo, Amplitude, IonQ

Thursday, Nov. 6: Datadog, Netscout, Appian, JFrog, Synaptics, GenDigital, Akamai, Five9, Block, Rackspace, Expensify, Dropbox

Image: News/Reve