Snowflake ups its AI game, Circle IPO blasts off, and Elon splits with Trump – News

Snowflake made a big play this week at its annual Summit to own a larger swath of the artificial intelligence opportunity — still based on data but bringing in AI models, agents and other software to get stuff done.

As Dave Vellante and George Gilbert put it in their Breaking Analysis deep dive, enterprise data platforms such as Snowflake and Databricks will be defined not by how well they store information but by how quickly they can convert data combined with business logic into automated actions. And in their latest Breaking Analysis, they drill down on Snowflake post-Summit to update their view of how it and other players are positioned.

CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy (pictured) made an impassioned pitch for Snowflake to lead that shift, but Salesforce, Amazon Web Services and a few others are knocking on that door too. And next week Databricks will get its turn at its Data+AI Summit to define how it’s going to play in that larger arena.

In the least surprising development of late, Elon Musk’s bromance with Trump is apparently over, and he’s even backing the president’s impeachment as Tesla’s stock plunged 14% Thursday. But it escalated fast — popcorn time! Though Musk may soon back off.

Assuming Musk still has enough cash, his xAI startup is going to spend $5 billion on new infrastructure. And the big spending to support AI continues, as Meta inked a 20-year deal to buy nuclear power and Amazon is spending $10 billion in North Carolina to expand its cloud infrastructure and advance AI.

On the earnings front, AI momentum boosted Broadcom and HPE results, though investors split on them, and MongoDB saw its shares rise almost 13%. But it’s still a mixed bag given the uncertain economy and Trump’s daily shifts on tariffs.

Amazon’s secretive Lab126 is now working on agentic AI, focused on robots. Autonomous robots? Hmm.

Reddit sued Anthropic for scraping its data without permission. This issue isn’t going to die, but it’s anybody’s guess what impact it will have on, well, future models.

Stablecoin provider Circle raised $1.1 billion in its IPO, and its shares jumped 168% on their first day of trading. We’ll see how stable its stock price is. Next up: Chime. And crypto exchange Gemini just filed confidentially to go public too.

Next week there’s not only Databricks’ Data+AI Summit but Cisco Live, Apple’s WWDC and AWS re:Inforce. On the earnings front, Oracle’s the big one set to report, as well as Adobe, GitLab and SailPoint.

Update: Silicon Valley lost two giants recently: Former longtime Hewlett-Packard CEO John Young on May 26, at age 93, and Bill Atkinson, a Macintosh pioneer and inventor of the web precursor Hypercard, on June 5, at age 74. They both represented some of the best in the Valley, unlike all too many current tech celebrities who seem more motivated by, well, fame and money. May they rest in peace up there with Bill, Dave and Steve.

Here’s the most important enterprise and emerging tech news from News and beyond:

AI and data: Snowflake drills down on enterprise AI

All the news, analysis and interviews from Snowflake Summit:

Snowflake and Databricks cross the Rubicon into a new competitive domain

Beyond walled gardens: How Snowflake navigates new competitive dynamics

The next frontier in enterprise AI: What to watch at Snowflake and Databricks summits

Snowflake platform enhancements focus on performance, governance and interoperability

Snowflake expands AI tools to streamline enterprise data workflows and speed machine learning

Snowflake buys Crunchy Data to add more bite to its AI agents

Data engineering workloads evolve as Snowflake redefines its value stack: theCUBE keynote analysis

Snowflake’s platform evolution spotlights metadata blind spots: theCUBE keynote analysis

Snowflake and Meta team up to drive model innovation on Cortex AI

Snowflake orchestrates its AI strategy through Cortex, unstructured data solutions and agents

Exclusive: Unravel is giving away a Snowflake performance optimization analyzer

RelationalAI introduces new graph processing features for its Snowflake app

A few other observations and gleanings from my interviews with researchers and execs:

* It goes without saying that Snowflake debuted a next-generation data warehouse that’s more than twice as fast, among many other features. One of the most interesting was Adaptive Compute, enabling users to avoid having to configure compute and other settings, and getting better performance as a result, especially for the kinds of quickly changing workloads such as AI.“ Adaptive will be the future,” Artin Avanes, head of Snowflake’s core data platform, told me (for now, it’s in private preview)..

* But all that felt like almost an afterthought next to the new AI features and services, including Snowflake Intelligence (soon in public preview), which allows, say, a sales manager to ask, “What were my top product sales in the West region last quarter, and why did this product outperform that one?” and then even have AI agents take actions such as sending notifications. The service can tap a wide variety of data sources, from structured tables to Slack chats.

* It’s one indication of how much higher Snowflake’s ambitions have become. As Dave Vellante and George Gilbert put it, enterprise data platforms will be defined not by how well they store information but by how quickly they can convert data combined with business logic into automated actions. “AI represents a new way of thinking about how different functions in a company operate,” Ramaswamy said in a press briefing. “We want to be the agent of transformation for our 10,000 customers. We want to be there with customers from the time data is there.”

* The big focus this week was on unstructured data, and no wonder: Up to 90% of the world’s data is unstructured, that is, not in well-organized tables, and it needs to be gathered up and massaged so it can provide deeper analysis. I talked with LandingAI, which is partnering with Snowflake to apply what it calls agentic vision to unstructured data, in particular documents, whose formats can be downright quirky. “We’re kind of like Lasik for LLMs,” said CEO Dan Maloney. And faster: Its Agentic Doc Extraction service was updated a week ago with 30 times the speed, important when you’re using reasoning models.

* AI agents, the new hot thing, also got a lot of attention at the summit, not least because they provide both a challenge and an opportunity for Snowflake as it busts further out of its data warehouse market. In short, can it become a sort of operating system for AI agents? It’s not the only one trying. As Vellante asked in his analysis of the keynote: “Are they just basically data infrastructure that’s serving up agentic platforms or are they going to become the agentic platform?”

* All this adds up to a democratization of data analysis beyond data scientists and business intelligence experts. Ultimately, Snowflake’s looking to make not only data analysis but applications most anyone can create — or maybe get an agent to do. “AI is a way to predict or use data to take actions based on it,” Dwarak Rajagopal, VP and head of AI engineering, told me. “Everybody could be a programmer. Everybody could be a specialist in whatever they want.”

Other new models and services

Amazon’s secretive research lab is developing robots with integrated agentic AI software

Workday launches AI agent developer toolset with third-party connector and custom widgets

AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio launches nonprofit LawZero AI lab, with a focus on safe AI

OpenAI gives ChatGPT access to cloud-based documents and third-party research tools

OpenAI enhances agentic AI development with improvements to Codex and the Agents SDK

Google revamps Gemini 2.5 Pro again, claiming superiority in coding and math

Mistral AI introduces Code programming assistant

Anthropic releases AI models exclusive to US national security customers

Postman looks to streamline API and agentic AI development with Agent Mode

Pegasystems expands features to build and manage AI agents

Exclusive: CData to embed its connectivity technology across Palantir analytics and AI platforms

Semantic data layer startup Cube automates analytics with AI agents

Money matters

Elon Musk’s xAI launches $5B debt sale to fuel AI infrastructure investments

Anysphere raises $900M for its AI-powered Cursor code editor

Collibra acquires Raito to enhance its data security capabilities

IBM acquires data analysis startup Seek AI, opens AI accelerator in NYC (per News)

Mind raises $30M to help businesses prevent data loss using AI

Sema4.ai raises $25M in funding for its AI agent platform

Wordsmith AI raises $25M to build legal AI for in-house teams

Ciroos.AI raises $21M for multi-agent site reliability engineering platform

Thread AI raises $20M for its AI-powered workflow automation platform

LuminX raises $5.5M to build AI vision models for warehouse operations

Policy

Reddit sues Anthropic over alleged scraping and commercial use of user data

OpenAI to retain deleted ChatGPT conversations following court order

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

Around the enterprise: HPE and MongoDB earnings shine in mixed bag

New products and services

Broadcom introduces Tomahawk 6 networking chip for large-scale AI clusters

Broadcom reboots CloudHealth with enhancements to broaden FinOps use

Arm’s latest compute subsystem to accelerate automotive AI chip design by up to a year

HPE expands fault-tolerant line with faster processors and more memory support

Money matters

Informatica CEO sees Salesforce acquisition as strategic expansion, not exit

AMD bags the team behind AI chipmaker Untether AI, its third acquisition in under two weeks

Meta inks 20-year nuclear power deal with Constellation Energy

Amazon plans to invest $10 billion in North Carolina to expand cloud computing infrastructure and advance AI innovation

GlobalFoundries to invest $3B more in US fab network

Data analytics chip startup Speedata closes $44M funding round

Financial technology company Chime seeking $11.2B valuation in upcoming IPO

Google will invest $500M in compliance program to settle shareholder lawsuit

Projectworks raises $12M to expand its project automation platform

Earnings:

AI chip demand propels Broadcom to another earnings beat, but shares drop after-hours

HPE’s stock rises on AI momentum and more clarity on market conditions

MongoDB crushes expectations and its stock makes huge gains after-hours

CrowdStrike earnings beat expectations but revenue outlook weighs on shares

Rubrik delivers strong results on surging cloud and subscription revenue

Asana shares drop as earnings results top estimates but revenue growth slows

Docusign shares fall on billings outlook despite strong earnings

Despite higher loss, higher revenue at Couchbase drives stock higher

We have lots more news on cloud, infrastructure and apps

Cyber beat: CrowdStrike’s troubles continue

Attack & response

CrowdStrike faces federal scrutiny following global Windows outage

Google finds generational divide in how users respond to rising online scams

Bitdefender report finds 84% of major attacks now involve legitimate tools

New services

Surfing the AI wave with zero trust everywhere: Five takeaways from CEO Jay Chaudhry’s keynote at Zscaler’s Zenith Live

Microsoft and CrowdStrike collaborate on shared threat actor mapping system

Zscaler expands zero-trust and AI capabilities across cloud and branch environments

Illumio and Nvidia team up to strengthen zero-trust security for critical infrastructure

Money matters

Merlin Ventures secures $75M+ for seed-stage cybersecurity fund

Zero Networks raises $55 million to expand microsegmentation and zero trust solutions

Managed cybersecurity service startup ThreatSpike raises $14M

More cybersecurity news here

Elsewhere in tech: Circle’s IPO rockets

Circle raises $1.1B after hiking IPO price, and shares still jump 170% on first day of trading

Cryptocurrency exchange operator Gemini files to go public

Anduril raises $2.5B in funding to finance manufacturing initiatives

Neuralink raises $650M at reported $9B pre-money valuation

Quantum startup Infleqtion eyes defense industry applications after raising $100M

Sandia National Labs deploys SpiNNcloud’s SpiNNaker2 brain-inspired supercomputer

AI-driven robotic wind turbine maintenance firm Aerones raises $62M

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

Comings and goings

IT management and cybersecurity firm Kaseya appointed former Intuit exec Rania Succar CEO.

Salesforce hired some of the team at Moonhub, a startup building AI tools for hiring (per News)

Amy Herzog is new chief information security officer at Amazon Web Services, moving over from the same role at Amazon’s AGI, ads, devices and global media and entertainment units (per The Stack).

Former AWS exec Adam Seligman is new chief technology officer at integration platform-as-a-service company Workato.

Microsoft gave LinkedIn chief Ryan Roslansky an added role running Office.

Uber named Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora to its board following executive shakeup.

Data labeling startup Scale AI hired the team behind Pesto AI, which helps companies recruit developers remotely. Founded in 2017 by Ayush Jaiswal and Rahul Jaimini, Pesto AI will shut down (per News).

Sierra Ventures hired Ashish Kakran, an investor in Cohere, Harness, Isovalent, Opaque and Exaforce, as partner to expand early-stage focus on AI, cloud infrastructure and cybersecurity.

What’s next

Events

June 8-12: Cisco Live, San Diego and virtual: News will have all the news, and theCUBE Research will be onsite for interviews and analysis.

June 9-12: Databricks AI+Data Summit, San Francisco and virtual: News will be there with all the news and theCUBE will be onsite with interviews and analysis.

June 9-13: Apple WWDC, Cupertino and virtual. News will have all the news.

June 16-18: AWS re:Inforce: TheCUBE will be onsite with interviews and analysis.

Earnings

Tuesday, June 10: GitLab

Wednesday, June 11: Oracle, SailPoint

Thursday, June 12: Adobe

Photo: Robert Hof/ News