The holidays didn’t interrupt the usual flow of activity in the public cloud, where several major developments over the past week set the stage for exciting prospects in the new year.

A stealth startup called Scaled Inference Inc. fired the opening shot after closing a $13.6 million funding round to build an artificial intelligence service that takes direct aim at IBM’s Watson. The brainchild of former Google engineers Olcan Sercinoglu (right) and Dmitry Lepikhin, Scaled Inference has spent the last year or so trying to remove human involvement from the analytics equation, an approach that contrasts sharply with the efforts of Big Blue and others to position the technology as complementary to existing roles. Making that ambitious goal possible is what the team describes as a unique mathematical model capable of matching problems with answers across a wide range of domains ranging from fraud detection to facial recognition.

Although the hosted platform is still in early development, Scaled Inference has already raised $27.2 million from investors including the latest round, which bumps its total valuation to a healthy $60 million. That’s especially impressive given that the startup only hit the scene in June, making it one of the newest players to try to capitalize on the exploding demand for cloud services.

The list of contenders includes other up-and-comers as well established names from adjacent segments such as Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd, which saw an estimated 15 percent revenue increase last year on the back of the trend, according to a New Year’s blog from CEO Ken Hu. The Chinese telecommunications giant invested aggressively in cloud computing over the last year, doubling down on enterprise solutions while expanding its global data center network.

Huawei is not the only industry heavyweight to have expanded its cloud arsenal lately. Amazon.com Inc. also made headlines last week after accidentally leaking the forthcoming launch of the new C4 instances it unveiled in November. The family is based on a customized version of the latest E5-2666 v3 processor from Intel that runs at a base speed of 2.9 GHz and can peak at 3.5 GHz thanks to built-in software optimizations.

The now-deleted announcement revealed that C4 machines will range from two virtual proccesors with 3.75 gigabytes of memory and 500Mbps of throughput at $0.116 an hour to 36 virtual processors, 10 gigabyes of memory and 4,000Mbps for $1848 per hour. The series replaces the C3 as the most powerful compute option in Amazon’s portfolio.