It’s Nvidia’s world. We just live in it

The artificial intelligence juggernaut kept cruising along this week thanks to big earnings results from Nvidia — and even Salesforce, the supposed epicenter of the SaaSpocalypse.

Nvidia not only beat all expectations for revenue, CEO Jensen Huang (pictured) indicated it’s going to be capacity-constrained for awhile longer, which certainly indicates no diminution of demand. Likewise the interest of investors, who bid the stock up almost 9% Thursday. Indeed, the AI chip giant has a huge looming opportunity as AI moves out to the network edge.

And it’s putting all that money to use, fast. This week came the report that it’s possibly buying AI code hosting firm Hugging Face to capture another level of the AI stack, reportedly investing big in Perplexity, teaming with Cisco Systems on even bigger rack-scale AI data centers, announcing new robotics hardware, an inference accelerator chip to speed AI agents… you get the idea.

Meanwhile, it looks like AI’s not going to end software-as-a-service anytime soon. Salesforce’s stock rocketed almost 23% Thursday as it crushed earnings expectations, surely a boost ahead of its Dreamforce conference next month. Workday did pretty well too, though investors weren’t that impressed.

For all that, AI anxiety only seems to intensify every week. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman himself said he thinks control of AI is concentrated in too few hands, two of which of course are his. None other than Bill Gates is worried too about AI’s impact on humanity, he explained in a 6,000-word manifesto.

It probably didn’t help that OpenAI and about a hundred other companies warned that AI-driven cyberattacks are about to explode before we’re ready to counter them. No wonder all this has Big Tech scrambling to limit the damage, in particular the surprisingly loud opposition across political parties — imagine that in this day and age — to AI data centers.

Big Tech may have another worry to contend with too. Meta Platforms settled charges that it addicted kids to social media by paying an $18 billion fine — large but not especially onerous paid over 10 years. But this won’t end with Meta.

Just in today: Stripe and Advent just abandoned their acquisition talks with PayPal, sending PayPal’s stock down almost 12% in Friday trading.

Next week there’s another spate of key hardware, software and cybersecurity earnings reports from Dell, Broadcom, HPE, Snowflake, UiPath, MongoDB, Palo Alto Networks, Zscaler and more, all shedding more light on the AI bubble buildout.

The fall conference season also gets underway next week with both VMware Explore and CrowdStrike Fal.Con, both in Las Vegas starting Monday. By the way, don’t miss Dave Vellante’s Breaking Analysis on CrowdStrike’s strategy.

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

Analysis, opinion and food for thought: AI anxiety

CrowdStrike’s post-Mythos surge: Moat, momentum and the blast-radius test

Breaking Analysis: From tokenmaxxing to sovereign alpha: Who controls your AI economics?

Sam Altman voices fears that control of AI could be centered in too few hands

So does Bill Gates, who calls for government regulation: Bill Gates issues stark warning about AI and the future of humanity Perhaps good to take someone like Gates seriously.

Andy Masley thinks the furor over is about … data centers themselves, not anger at Big Tech or AI. I’m still not so sure the latter isn’t the bigger factor. Though this is a well-reasoned piece, I still see and hear a lot of anti-AI sentiment for which data centers are the most conveniently tangible target, one that has not drawn significant opposition until the AI buildout.

To wit, per the Wall Street Journal: Inside Big Tech’s frantic race to quell the growing backlash to AI

Why every AI agent needs an org chart

AI and data: It’s Nvidia’s world…

Money matters

Nvidia reportedly acquires AI project hosting platform Hugging Face for $12.9B That seemed to come together fast, given reports just a few days earlier: Report: AI model hub Hugging Face exploring sale at $13B valuation

AWS buys DuckLabs to bring DuckDB’s embeddable analytics to more enterprises

Nvidia reportedly eyes another investment in Perplexity AI at a $30B valuation

Valor, Point72 back General Intuition at $6B valuation as AI startup pushes into robotics (per TechCrunch)

Consumer-focused AI assistant startup Instinct reportedly raising $250M

Owner raises $240M for its restaurant management platform

Robotics AI startup Generalist reportedly raises $200M

Major record labels, AMD back $76M round for Stability AI

Deep Cogito raises $43M to develop self-improving AI models

Liner raises $36.1M to take its evidence-first AI search to enterprise customers

Agentic web search infrastructure startup Keenable raises $26M

Transfyr launches physical AI platform for science with $25M seed funding

Policy

Court rules Pentagon can’t ban Anthropic’s AI models

New models and services

Nobody knows who built AI coding model Ox Alpha or where the code goes Mystery solved: Z.ai open-sources ‘Ox Alpha’ model as GLM-5.3-Flash

Perplexity AI launches Portable Computer on-device AI agent

Glean unveils Tau desktop workspace, claims token-cost edge over Claude

Anthropic updates Claude’s memory to enhance customization and protect sensitive topics

Anthropic previews MHS standard for AI agents that operate machines

Harness tackles influx of agent-delivered code with Code Repository and AI Code Review

Thomson Reuters launches proprietary AI model for legal work

Plaud unveils wearable earbuds with built-in agentic AI interface

Ropedia launches next-gen wearable capture device for robotic AI training data

Physical AI’s moment has arrived – but moving from demo to deployment is the hard part. AWS wants to fix that

Policy

Trump defends AI data center buildout amid pushback

Around the enterprise: … we just live in it

New products and services

Cisco and Nvidia boost the AI factory:

Cisco expands rack-scale secure AI factory infrastructure for neocloud and sovereign clouds

AI factories enter the execution era as Cisco and Nvidia push rack-scale systems into production

John and Zeus sum it all up:

The network becomes the computer as Cisco and Nvidia accelerate AI factory rack-scale

Democratizing the AI data center: How Cisco and Nvidia are bringing rack-scale power to the enterprise

Plus exclusive interviews from theCUBE:

Cisco and Nvidia take AI factories from rack to runtime

Nvidia and Cisco push the enterprise AI factory into the rack-scale era

As if Nvidia weren’t doing enough already, there’s more this week:

Nvidia doubles compute for entry-level edge robotics with Jetson Orin Nano 2

Nvidia’s dedicated inference accelerator Groq 3 LPX enters full production to supercharge AI agents

Apple refreshes Mac mini, Mac Studio lineups with new chips

IBM is developing a dual-architecture chip to run Arm-native AI apps on Z mainframes and Linux servers

Nutanix expands cloud platform with controls for agentic AI

Tempo launches Workforce Intelligence to tie AI spend to Jira work items

Money matters

Andreessen Horowitz raises $1.1B AI infrastructure fund for chips, robots and more

Lambda is raising up to $3B before an IPO, months after borrowing $917M for chips (per Bloomberg)

Navitas Semiconductor acquires power management firm Claros for $232.8M

Never mind: Stripe and Advent abandoned their $50 billion pursuit of PayPal

Data center power startup Emerald AI raises $150M at $1.05B valuation

Quintessent bags $40M to develop lasers for AI clusters

Workplace fraud monitoring startup Yardstik raises $30M to help employers keep tabs on their staff

Agentic web search infrastructure startup Keenable raises $26M

Runable raises $21M to realize small businesses’ growth vision using AI agents

Chip software automation startup Embedd raises $2.7M

Earnings:

Nvidia doubles its revenue as demand for AI chips accelerate despite bubble fears

Analysis from John Furrier: Nvidia’s next multibillion-dollar market: Breaking the AI factory out of the data center

And from Zeus Kerravala: Five thoughts on Nvidia’s quarter — and what it means for enterprise IT buyers

Salesforce scoffs at SaaSpocalypse fears with a crushing earnings beat

Workday posts strong earnings and revenue amid rapid uptake of its AI agents

Autodesk shares fall despite Q2 beat as cash flow guidance narrows

CrowdStrike and Okta shares jump on second-quarter beats and raised outlooks

Rubrik shares drop on raised outlook as SentinelOne slides on profit guide

After posting a solid earnings beat, Elastic’s stock bounces higher in extended trading

Everpure beats on growth, raises outlook

Zoom falls 6% as soft Q3 profit guidance overshadows double beat

Box earnings match, revenue tops estimates

PagerDuty beats Q2 estimates but stock dips on modest guidance

Nutanix tops estimates as external storage growth helps counter hardware squeeze

HP beats on earnings and revenue but PC unit slump sinks the stock

Marvell’s stock sinks despite earnings beat and strong guidance

Synopsys slides even as it boosts full-year guidance on back of strong Q3 results

Policy

Meta settles closely watched social media addiction lawsuit for $18B

Cyber beat: The AI cyberattack explosion is nigh

Attack & response

OpenAI, Anthropic and 100-plus firms warn AI attacks are about to explode

Nvidia NemoClaw flaw let attackers poison the model behind a developer’s AI agent

Fake Codex installer tricks Mac users into pasting malware, Cato finds

AWS patches SDK flaw that turned a region field into credential theft

New services

Sonar launches Hunter Agent to find flaws code scanners can’t see

Exclusive: Mate Security launches Gamebooks to govern how AI agents run investigations

Nucleus Security launches Helix, an AI engine for exposure management

Heelr launches marketplace for identity-verified cybersecurity experts

Money matters

Socure raises $156M at $5.2B valuation and acquires AI startup Fravity

Alice raises $140M as its AI security business grows more than 500%

Vulnerability-free container image startup Echo acquires Minimus

Social engineering defense firm Doppel named a new chief marketing officer: Alyssa Smrekar, formerly with Intercom, Okta, VMware, SpringSource and VerticalResponse. She previously served as Doppel’s SVP of marketing.

Former LevelBlue and Trustwave CMO Craig Rones is the new CMO at ConnectWise, an IT management software platform for service providers.