Artificial intelligence once again dominated the news this week, but not so much in the software as the hardware.

Despite investor worries about Nvidia’s already high stock price, the AI chipmaker knocked its earnings out of the park Wednesday, sending its stock up 16% and dragging the Nasdaq up 3%.

The same day, Intel announced its bid to become the “systems foundry for the AI era” with a goal to become the No. 2 chip foundry by 2030 — a goal that CEO Pat Gelsinger (pictured) said would require $100 billion in deals to make chips for other companies, one of which will be Microsoft.

Not all was well on the stock market front, though, as Palo Alto Networks’ stock tanked on weak guidance — a common pattern for enterprise companies these days. Whether that’s a signal that cybersecurity’s Teflon spending profile is weakening remains to be seen.

You can hear much more on this news from John Furrier and Dave Vellante on theCUBE Pod, out now on YouTube. And don’t miss Vellante’s weekly deep dive, Breaking Analysis, out this weekend.

Here’s the most important news this week on SiliconANGLE:

Chip competition heats up

All that competition isn’t hurting the world’s most popular chipmaker yet: Nvidia’s data center GPU sales grow by a stunning 409% on huge demand for AI chips And with a 15% stock jump Thursday, its market cap is grazing — and briefly hit — a stunning $2 trillion. This is one of those moments that defines a new era, like Netscape and then Cisco and then Google at the dawn of the web. Nvidia is leading the AI era, not just in chips but in software — perhaps providing what John Furrier calls the AI operating system. There’s much more analysis on a new power panel on theCUBE with Furrier and ace analysts David Linthicum now with theCUBE Research, Tim Crawford with AVOA and Dion Hinchcliffe with Constellation Research — including the potential that Nvidia may run into headwinds.

No longer willing to miss the latest tech boat, Intel held its true coming-out for its foundry business this week, along with updates on its progress in chip process technologies: Intel unveils Intel Foundry with eye to AI and next-gen lithography manufacturing

Some takeaways from its IFS Direct Connect event Wednesday in San Jose, which I attended:

• By CEO Pat Gelsinger’s reckoning, Intel will need $100 billion in foundry business to get to No. 2 by 2030, but he invited “Jensen, Christiano, Sundar and even Lisa” to be customers, referring of course to the CEOs of Nvidia, Qualcomm, Google and Advanced Micro Devices. That said, Gelsinger (pictured) conceded that it’s Intel’s own products that will be filling most of the fabs it’s building in the next two or three years, though like others such as TSMC’s, some have been delayed on slowing demand, slow distribution of Chips Act money and other issues.
• Why choose Intel Foundry? Gelsinger talked up Intel’s system and packaging expertise, a lot of partners such as Synopsis and Cadence for its more advanced process nodes coming, as well as its sustainability efforts such as using 99% renewable energy in its fabs. Dave Vellante is skeptical — more on that on theCUBE Pod and in a power panel on theCUBE, both well worth watching — that the chiplet packaging approach indicates much more than that Intel remains far behind in its ability to produce in volume the huge chips that are driving the leading edge of AI today.
• In a “hell freezes over” moment, Intel introduced its “most important partner,” Arm, bringing onstage CEO Rene Haas onstage, who said, “You guys have been terrific” to work with. Foundry chief Stu Pann added, “There is no way you can be in the foundry business without Arm.” Indeed, since so many potential foundry customers are using Arm designs.
• Intel also updated its chip process technology roadmap, in particular talking up its 14A node coming after 2025. In any case, Intel says it will succeed in its “five nodes in four years” plan by the end of this year, and it claims its 18A node that Microsoft will use to make a chip of its own design will put it ahead of TSMC and Samsung by 2025. Get the full download from Paul Alcorn at Tom’s Hardware.
• No word on Chips Act money yet, but Gelsinger implied it’s coming soon. In a conversation with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Gelsinger circled around Altman’s reported search for $7 trillion in funding for chip plants, but he said that was inaccurate — including not just fabs but data centers and energy among other things — while also saying the demand will be large. “I expect the market for AI compute to be a different kind of good. It’s more like energy, where there’s a certain amount of demand at some price, and less at a higher price,” he said. No promises that he’d hit up Intel for some of that capacity, even if Gelsinger seemed to be offering, but Altman’s presence there was significant.
• The bottom line: Even as Intel faces huge challenges to its ambitious plans, the AI boom and accompanying demand for chips could provide a lifeline for the iconic chipmaker and an opportunity for the U.S. to regain crucial ground in chips. “Overall demand appears to be insatiable for the need for computing for several years into the future,” said Gelsinger, who added that the industry is likely to be capacity-limited in this decade.

Also on the chip front:

GlobalFoundries receives $1.5B in CHIPS Act funding to expand its fab network

Arm announces 3rd Gen Neoverse Compute Subsystems blueprints and expanded design ecosystem

Network chip supplier Astera Labs to go public amid rapid sales growth

Australia’s top supercomputing center deploys Nvidia’s Grace Hopper Superchips for quantum computing research

Earnings

Continuing the familiar pattern (except Nvidia, above, and a couple of others), many enterprise companies saw pretty good earnings, but muted outlooks spooked investors:

Palo Alto Networks strong quarterly performance overshadowed by outlook concerns CEO Nikesh Arora blamed “spending fatigue in cybersecurity,” especially by the government

Amplitude shares drop on mixed quarterly results and lower-than-expected outlooks

RingCentral makes progress toward profitability, but light guidance sends stock lower

Five9 beats on earnings but stock falls on weak first-quarter outlook

Synopsys raises full-year earnings outlook following first-quarter revenue surge

Rivian shares tumble 15% amid job cuts and wider quarterly loss

DigitalOcean beats expectations under the helm of new CEO Paddy Srinivasan

Block’s share rise 13% in late trading after it delivers a surprise profit

Expensify’s shares rose about 4% after-hours after it reported its fourth-quarter net loss more than doubled on a 19% decline in revenue. It held an unusual product roadmap “call” for investors on its own, new Expensify platform that it’s counting on this year.

AI mania with a big-data chaser

Rob Strechay and George Gilbert lay out their view on the sixth data platform, with perspective from dbt Labs: Metadata is the glue: federated data silos, metadata and governance

Palo Alto Networks SVP Howie Xu reviews the AI landscape: Inside emerging AI topics, from new investment to open-source models

Gartner’s Frances Karamouzis has advice on how enterprises should approach AI: Organizations need a business-driven AI strategy, not a CAIO

What could go wrong? Seriously, there may be a need for regulation of some kind, but I wonder how this doesn’t just get swamped in ancillary political battles: US lawmakers form AI task force to develop safety policy

Shelly Kramer says big tech companies must take the lead in reskilling people for the AI era: Momentum builds among Big Tech firms for AI reskilling initiatives

Inference.ai’s new generative AI chatbot takes the guesswork out of GPU sourcing

Stability AI announces early preview of Stable Diffusion 3 text-to-image model

Predibase debuts LoRA Land: 25 open-source LLMs that can be fine-tuned for almost any AI use

DatologyAI raises $11.65M to automate data curation for more efficient AI training

Graphcore reportedly explores sale amid tough competition in AI chip market

Google has been busy:

Google releases the Gemma family of open-source AI models inspired by Gemini

And needs to get busier: Google admits its Gemini AI was problematic on racially diverse images and vows a fix And so it did: Google apologies over Gemini image generation inaccuracies

Google enhances Workspace productivity suite with new Gemini generative AI capabilities

Google brings its generative AI writing aid to any website through Chrome

Microsoft releases automated PyRIT red teaming tool for finding AI model risks

AWS brings Mistral AI’s open-source LLMs to Amazon Bedrock

Dataloop Marketplace aims to streamline AI application development

Adobe launches AI Assistant for Acrobat

Elsewhere in enterprise, cloud and beyond

Report: Microsoft developing custom network card for its GPU servers

Database maker MariaDB receives $37M tentative takeover proposal

Dell bids to ease cloud transformation for network service providers

Major tech players work with Linux Foundation to improve the mapping universe

Data protection startup Clumio raises $75M after quadrupling its recurring revenue

Application observability firm Apica buys telemetry data startup Circonus and adds more funding

Highway 9 Networks closes $25M funding to deliver more reliable connectivity to any device anywhere

Exclusive: Observability startup SigScalr plans to revolutionize log search

Multiplayer launches collaborative software development tool into public beta

Bioptimus nabs $35M to accelerate biology research with AI

First major tech IPO of the year: Reddit files for IPO after annual revenue tops $800M

AT&T restores network following large-scale cellular outage

European Commission reportedly set to fine Apple $539M for antitrust violations

EU launches probe into TikTok over possible failure to protect minors

Ethereum restaking protocol EigenLayer raises $100 million led by a16z

AMD and Wormhole aim to boost multi-blockchain application performance

The real leaders never left: Tech Leaders Fled San Francisco During the Pandemic. Now, They’re Coming Back

Locking up LockBit: a ransomware takedown

International law enforcement operation takes down LockBit leak site and Authorities arrest two LockBit members, disrupt ransomware group’s infrastructure

And other cyber news:

Resilience acquires BreachQuest to enhance cyber risk management and incident response

Tufin expands security solutions portfolio with AKIPS acquisition

Data leak reveals inner workings of Chinese state-linked hacking group

Apple introduces post-quantum cryptography protocol for iMessage

FBI warns Chinese hackers’ malware prepositioning efforts at a ‘fever pitch’

IBM report finds cybercriminals are increasingly exploiting legitimate user identities

FTC hits antivirus firm Avast with fine for selling customer data it promised to protect

Comings and goings

Cisco Systems COO and EVP Maria Martinez is leaving the company after six years.

AWS infrastructure hardware VP Ahmed Shihab has left to join rival Microsoft Azure as VP of Azure Storage.

Hitachi Vantara names former HPE Fellow Ayman Abouelwafa chief technology officer.

The Justice Department named Jonathan Mayer, a Princeton professor and former technology adviser to Vice President Kamala Harris when she was a senator, as its chief AI officer.

The Bored Ape Yacht Club’s creator has a new leader: Yuga Labs co-founder Greg “Garga” Solano is returning as CEO to the Bored Ape Yacht Club’s creator, as former Activision exec Daniel Alegre departs after less than a year in the job.

What’s next

TheCUBE will be live onsite at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona Feb. 26-29 to cover all the news with interviews throughout the show.

It’ll be another busy earnings week with some big reports to close out February, taking full advantage of the leap day:

Monday, Feb. 26: Zoom and Workday

Tuesday, Feb. 27: Thoughtworks and Splunk

Wednesday, Feb. 28: Snowflake, Salesforce, HP, Pure Storage, Nutanix, C3 AI, Okta, Duolingo and Zuora  

Thursday, Feb. 29: Dell, HPE, NetApp, Zscaler, Autodesk and Elastic

Photo: Robert Hof/SiliconANGLE