Perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the artificial intelligence boom was never going to be unalloyed good for every enterprise technology provider looking to leverage AI.
But this week, investors got a taste of the downside and they didn’t like it, sending stocks of Dell Technologies, MongoDB, Salesforce, UiPath Nutanix, Workday and more plummeting as it became apparent that spending on generative AI technologies such as ChatGPT is stealing budget from other tech spending, at least on the software side. And for Dell, all those AI servers it sold didn’t produce better profits because, as theCUBE Research Chief Analyst Dave Vellante says, all the profit in hardware is going to Nvidia.
It will be interesting to see how June quarter results for many of the biggest tech providers such as Microsoft and Google fare toward the end of July, but investors will be very wary.
Meantime, the battle for AI dominance rages on, as Elon Musk’s xAI raised $6 billion and CoreWeave reportedly is planning a 2025 initial public offering of stock. And companies such as Google, which stepped in the AI mud again with bizarre answers with its new AI Overviews service, are striving the fix generative AI issues that may not have a ready solution.
Oh, and no word yet on whether Donald Trump supporters in technology such as Musk, David Sacks and Chamath Palihapitiya will continue that support him now that he’s a convicted felon. Seems like complaining about prosecuting someone, let alone a presumptive presidential nominee, for falsifying business records isn’t a good look for businesspeople. But at least we know who has principles and who doesn’t.
Next week is another big one for events, with Computex, Snowflake’s Data Cloud Summit and Cisco Live headlining the calendar. And HPE, CrowdStrike and a couple other companies reporting earnings next week will provide another read on the tech-driven stock market.
This and other news, especially what’s happening in enterprise software and hardware, are discussed in depth on John Furrier’s and Vellante’s weekly podcast theCUBE Pod, out this afternoon on YouTube. Also, don’t miss Vellante’s weekly deep dive, Breaking Analysis, due out this weekend.
Here’s this week’s roundup of the most important tech stories from SiliconANGLE and beyond:
The race for AI dominance
Money matters
Elon Musk’s xAI raises $6B to build new AI services
CoreWeave plans for 2025 IPO (from The Information)
OpenAI tightens its grip on news media with Vox Media and Atlantic partnerships
Transcend reels in $40M for its privacy management toolkit
Maven AGI unveils AI platform after securing $20M for global expansion
GaiaNet raises $10M for its decentralized AI agent project
Data privacy startup Zendata launches with $2M in funding
Redpanda acquires Benthos to enhance its data streaming platform
New services
Scale AI publishes its first LLM Leaderboards, ranking AI model performance in specific domains
Mistral AI open-sources new Codestral language language model for developers
Chromebook Plus receives built-in AI updates with Gemini for photos and writing
Apple will reportedly introduce AI-generated emojis, LLM-powered Siri with iOS 18
PricewaterhouseCoopers becomes first reseller of ChatGPT Enterprise in US and UK
Incorta debuts enterprise-grade foundation for private and secure generative AI applications
DataGPT expands generative AI chat-based business analytics with Google Analytics connector
OpsMill launches open-source Infrahub platform to ease network data management
And a spat: Elon Musk and Meta’s AI maestro Yann LeCun almost come to blows online
Reining in AI (maybe):
Google details AI Overviews changes designed to tackle inaccurate content Google tries to explain why AI Overviews had those weird answers — with some success, but I also think it points to the basic problem LLMs have that making stuff up, which is what they do, is a feature and a bug.
Aporia introduces real-time guardrails for multimodal AI applications
OpenAI forms safety and security committee to oversee AI projects as it trains next model
OpenAI disrupts international influence operations using its AI tools
Around the enterprise
Earnings
Enterprise software firms take a big hit on slowing demand, partly because AI is sucking all the air out of the budgets:
UiPath’s stock plummets as CEO Rob Enslin abruptly resigns and guidance disappoints
Salesforce shares tumble after-hours on first earnings miss since 2006
MongoDB’s stock tanks on lower guidance
Box beats targets on earnings, but light guidance holds stock price in check
But not all enterprise software companies are sucking wind:
Elastic shares climb 8% on strong earnings and revenue beats in fourth quarter
Asana impresses investors with better-than-expected results
C3.ai earnings tops views, stock rises on revenue outlook
PagerDuty revenue stabilizes as it renews focus on enterprise
HashiCorp announces healthy earnings ahead of IBM acquisition
Hardware’s not doing so great either for some companies:
Dell’s stock plummets as rising demand for AI servers eats away at its gross margin
Shares of Nutanix plunge on lower guidance, while Pure Storage jumps on bullish forecast
Nutanix CEO sees sales slowdown as temporary
Encapsulating in a single company the story of AI edging out other spending: Booming AI chip demand helps Marvell offset alarming revenue declines elsewhere but stock sags
Rising commercial PC sales help HP beat earnings and revenue targets
Mixed results in cyber:
Zscaler posts strong growth, but SentinelOne shares fall on missed outlook metric
Okta shares rise on strong earnings and upbeat outlook
More money matters
Harness acquires Split Software to enable feature flag experimentation in software workflows
Bridgepoint acquires majority stake in intranet startup LumApps at $650M valuation
Report: China sets up $47.5B fund to boost its semiconductor sector
Report: AWS to spend billions on new cloud data center infrastructure in Italy
Frore Systems nabs $90M for its solid-state chip cooling technology
In other news
More antibodies around Nvidia: Intel, Google and other tech giants team up to develop UALink AI chip interconnect
Arm debuts new flagship mobile CPU and GPU designs
New JFrog-GitHub partnership aims to streamline ‘EveryOps’ for developers
Cloud asset management startup Firefly raises $23M 8 months after murder of co-founder
Salesforce bought compensation management firm Spiff in February for $419M
Google to spend $2 Billion for Malaysia data center and cloud services
Cyber beat
Breaches and busts
Department of Justice says it has taken down a large botnet with 19M unique IP address
Law enforcement task force shuts down six malware droppers
ShinyHunters lists 560M stolen Ticketmaster user records for sale following BreachForums resurgence
After FBI takedown, hacking site BreachForums returns using original domain
Check Point warns of increase in enterprise attacks targeting vulnerable VPNs
2.8M+ records exposed in data breach at prescription management company Sav-Rx
In other news
Adaptive Shield expands SaaS security platform to enhance permissions and data management
FIDO Alliance introduces Face Verification Certification to enhance biometric security
Elsewhere in tech
Amazon expands drone deliveries with FAA approval in US
OpenAI relaunches robotics unit four years after shutting it down
Google and Magic Leap partner on augmented reality deal
Switchboard raises $7.5M to help provide blockchain projects links to real-world data
What’s next
Events
June 2-6: Cisco Live, Las Vegas. Bob Laliberte from theCUBE Research will be there and SiliconANGLE will have all the news. And check out Zeus Kerravala’s preview of key things to watch for: What to expect at Cisco Live 2024 edition
June 3-7: Computex, Taipei, Taiwan: SiliconANGLE will have the major news.
June 3-6: Snowflake Data Cloud Summit, San Francisco. TheCUBE will be there and so will I. A week later is Databricks’ Data + AI Summit and we’ll be there too.
June 3-5: Qlik Connect, Orlando. TheCUBE will be there June 4.
Earnings
June 3: GitLab
June 4: HPE and CrowdStrike
June 5: Couchbase and Smartsheet
Image: SiliconANGLE/Ideogram
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