The AI boom didn’t quite save Nvidia earnings, but enterprise software cashed in – News

In the most-watched tech event this week, Nvidia came up (a bit) short on earnings, but it still offered a pretty darn good growth projections.

Thing is, they didn’t include any possible sales to China, which don’t seem out of the question at some point. No surprise that investors mostly gave it a pass, the stock down less than a point Thursday.

It was a mixed bag for other enterprise hardware and software, as Snowflake, MongoDB, Box, Autodesk and Elastic outperformed, thanks to enterprises using their wares to build AI apps, along with Pure Storage and NetApp. But Dell, Nutanix, HP and Marvell disappointed, though not massively so, mostly on revenue outlooks investors wish were a little higher. Well, sure.

Next week’s bellwether earnings include Salesforce, Broadcom, HPE, UiPath and Zscaler.

VMware is trying to remain relevant in cloud application development in the AI era, adding AI features to its VMware Cloud Foundation for private clouds and its Tanzu application platform. All well and good, but it’s still an uphill battle against the big cloud providers that are still drawing in more enterprises to their platforms every day.

Not to be an AI doomer, but more downsides of AI are emerging: actual job and website revenue losses, plus Elon Musk’s haymaker against Apple and OpenAI, Anthropic’s possibly precedent-setting copyright infringement lawsuit settlement, and, far from least, the death of a teen his parents blame in a lawsuit on conversations with ChatGPT, and now a murder-suicide apparently fed by ChatGPT. If not deal killers, all this will require more than sheer boosterism while whistling past the graveyard to keep AI’s momentum going.

But so far that’s not stopping enterprises from diving further in. Walmart, for instance, is all-in on AI agents. Paul Gillin digs into what the retail giant is doing on AI’s cutting edge.

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

AI and data: Cracks mar AI’s shiny veneer

Food for thought

Landmark AI wrongful death lawsuit alleges OpenAI’s ChatGPT played major role in teen’s suicide

Stanford study finds AI has reduced availability of entry-level programming jobs

The web is fracturing, says Cautious Optimism’s Alex Wilhelm, because AI scrapers provide no business model for websites to allow them to crawl them freely.

How to argue with an AI booster, from Ed Zitron

Intellyx’s Jason Bloomberg finds some evidence agents are more than marketing hype: Early leaders in the agentic AI race show agents are here to stay

Money matters

Report: Vercel is raising new funding at $9B valuation amid AI growth

Thoma Bravo to acquire contact center software provider Verint for $2B

MariaDB buys its former subsidiary SkySQL to enhance its agentic AI and serverless capabilities

Vector Capital to acquire AI revenue enablement firm Showpad, combine it with Bigtincan (not surprisingly, under the Showpad name)

Uniphore buys Orby AI and Autonom8 to extend its automation capabilities

Databricks to buy Sequoia-backed Tecton in AI agent push (per Reuters)

AI-native CRM startup Attio adds $52M in new funding

InstaLILY gets $25M to accelerate industry automation with agentic AI teammates

Maisa AI reels in $25M for its AI agent development platform

FriendliAI raises $20M in funding to accelerate AI inference workloads

Sleep.ai raises $5.5M to aid in rest with data-backed sleeping insights

Bench IQ raises $5.3M for AI-based judicial intelligence platform

Interhuman AI raises €2M to understand body language and human communication better

New models and services

A deep dive into Walmart’s agentic AI achievements: Walmart embraces agentic AI with major machine learning platform upgrade and developer ‘super agent’

OpenAI and Microsoft debut new voice models

Elon Musk’s xAI releases agentic coding model aimed at high speed and affordability

YouTube tests AI edits on Shorts without disclosure sparking creator backlash

Google updates Gemini with powerful new AI image model with photo editing capabilities

Google rolls out image-to-video capability to Google Vids powered by Veo 3

Gemini AI lands on Google Distributed Cloud for secure on premises adoption

Anthropic pilots experimental Claude AI plugin that can take control of Chrome

HPE Juniper rolls out agentic AI to simplify IT operations and improve user experience

Harness deploys AI agents to automate every aspect of software delivery after code generation

Hyland introduces Context Engine and Agent Mesh to simplify enterprise AI

Linux Foundation takes over Solo.io’s open-source Agentgateway project

Sendbird launches voice AI agents to bring human-grade conversation to customer calls

Qualified adds video and full-funnel features to its AI ‘superagent’ sales rep

Akka and Deloitte Canada team up to address cost and scale of agentic AI

Qualified expands Piper into an AI superagent for agentic marketing

Understanding the pivotal role of Nvidia Spectrum-XGS Ethernet in the rollout of AI

Policy

Elon Musk’s xAI sues Apple and OpenAI over alleged anticompetitive practices

Anthropic settles high-profile class action lawsuit alleging copyright infringement

Silicon Valley AI leaders launch $100M Leading the Future super-PAC

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

Around the enterprise: Nvidia falls just a bit short

Earnings

Nvidia didn’t set the market on fire, but who really expected it would be able to do that? Not a bad report, all in all: Nvidia beats forecasts, but weaker data center sales drag down the stock

Dave Vellante’s analysis of Huang’s industry capital spending claim: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang claims $600B in annual capital spending – wait, what?

Enterprise software is looking good given all the economic uncertainty:

MongoDB boosts outlook on strong earnings and revenue momentum and its stock jumps

Box bumps up its guidance after posting solid earnings and revenue

Snowflake’s stock pops as AI momentum drives solid earnings and revenue beat

Elastic’s stock jumps on impressive earnings and revenue beat

Autodesk’s stock jumps 9%+ on strong earnings results

But it was a mixed bag for enterprise hardware:

Soft outlook weighs on Dell’s stock despite soaring AI server sales

Pure Storage’s impressive earnings thrill Wall Street, but Nutanix and NetApp disappoint

HP cites strong demand for AI PCs as it beats expectations on revenue, but investors aren’t impressed

Marvell’s stock slumps on concerns over custom silicon, but long-term prospects look strong

And investors got mixed messages on cybersecurity too:

CrowdStrike shares dip as strong earnings results offset by cautious outlook

SentinelOne shares rise on earnings beat, raised outlook

More money matters

Professional website design platform Framer raises $100M at $2B valuation

Integrated photonics startup OpenLight gets $34M to design and build faster interconnects for AI chips

Policy

Intel warns US government’s investment could lead to business risks … like almost everything else Trump does.

US makes it harder for chipmakers to run fabs in China amid new Alibaba processor reports

News and analysis from Broadcom’s VMware Explore conference:

Broadcom clears the way for AI-native private clouds with VMware Cloud Foundation

VMware Tanzu delivers speedy, AI-ready data access for AI agents

Keynote analysis: Private cloud defines VMware’s streamlined strategy

Broadcom’s VMware overhaul puts private cloud at the center of enterprise AI shift

Other new products and services

Powering the age of robotics, Nvidia launches Jetson Thor into general availability

D-Matrix reveals plan to break through AI’s ‘memory wall’ with 3D DRAM-based chip architecture

Amplitude expands Web Experimentation with self service capabilities

We have lots more news on cloud, infrastructure and apps

Cyber beat: DOGE’s security hangover

Attack & response

Whistleblower says DOGE copied Social Security data to insecure cloud environment

FBI and allies warn Salt Typhoon cyber campaign has targeted 200 US companies in 80 countries

Salesloft breach compromises ‘numerous’ Salesforce environments

Microsoft report warns Storm-0501 is turning cloud features into ransomware weapons

Attackers exploit Zoom and Teams impersonations to deliver ScreenConnect malware

New research shows passkeys can be hijacked through malicious extensions

New services

Cloudflare rolls out new defenses for generative AI in the enterprise

Cloudflare takes aim at AI security gaps with confidence ratings

Commvault expands HyperScale portfolio with new edge and high-performance options

Brazil’s first digital-only bank relies on Zscaler to roll out zero-trust security everywhere

Money matters

Okta acquires Axiom Security after better-than-expected second quarter

More cybersecurity news here

Elsewhere in tech

M0 raises $40M to build custom ‘universal stablecoin’ infrastructure for developers

Blockchain startup aPriori raises $20M to expand institutional-grade trading infrastructure

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

Comings and goings

Researchers are already leaving Meta’s new Superintelligence Lab (per Wired)

Alphabet’s life sciences arm Verily laid off staff as it cut its devices program (per Business Insider)

What’s next

Earnings

Tuesday, Sept. 2: Zscaler

Wednesday, Sept. 3: Salesforce, HPE, C3 AI, PagerDuty, Asana

Thursday, Sept. 4: Broadcom, UiPath, Docusign, Samsara

Photo: Robert Hof/ News