UPDATED 13:48 EDT / JULY 12 2024

AI

AWS aims its AI push at enterprises, and the chip industry dreams of an AI boom

Despite the seeming dominance of OpenAI and Microsoft in generative artificial intelligence, it’s becoming clear that the other cloud providers, not to mention AI startups, will make this anything but a winner-take-all business.

Amazon Web Services made it latest bid to be a major player at its summit in New York this week, aiming to steal a march in generative AI via enterprises, not just developers. That said, it also provided a boost for developers with this week’s introduction of App Studio.

The money keeps piling into AI as Skild AI, Hebbia, Hayden AI and others raise big rounds. And SoftBank bought Graphcore to boost its AI ambitions. But exits remain slow as initial public offerings are still in the doldrums and regulators give the side eye to big tech acquisitions — just look at Alphabet’s purchase of HubSpot getting called off on apparent concerns it could face antitrust scrutiny.

And some older companies aren’t yet benefiting from the AI boom. UiPath laid off 10% of its staff as returning CEO Daniel Dines tries to ensure its robotic process automation services remain relevant amid the gen AI boom. In a different industry, Intuit also announced cutbacks.

The chipmaking equipment industry is gearing up for a trillion-dollar AI chip opportunity. We’ll see if anybody but Nvidia gets the spoils, but energy concerns are likely to weigh in favor of alternatives to power-hungry graphics processing units. But there seems to be plenty of opportunity outside the cloud providers, as demonstrated in Paul Gillin’s story on how eBay does AI — on-premises, not in the cloud for the most part.

Here’s all the news this week from SiliconANGLE and beyond:

AI and data: AWS is fully awake on generative AI

An interesting and contrarian case study by Paul Gillin: Where does eBay do most of its AI development? You might be surprised

The skinny from theCUBE Research analyst David Linthicum: Is the mainframe a viable option for generative AI?

Optimism abounds as semiconductor industry takes aim at AI-fueled trillion-dollar market

Lots of news and analysis from SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE Research’s unsponsored, onsite editorial coverage of AWS Summit New York:

AWS introduces App Studio to speed up application development with AI

Navigating the generative AI revolution: AWS’ Matt Wood weighs in on possible platform shift

From code to cloud, how is AWS shaping the gen AI landscape? TheCUBE keynote analysis from AWS Summit NY

AWS’ AI and sustainability push: theCUBE’s analysis from AWS Summit New York

Amazon updates its commitment to responsible use of generative AI

Transforming tech: AWS’ strategic AI integration and Marketplace evolution

Money matters

SoftBank buys Graphcore, the British chipmaking startup, to fuel its AI ambitions

AMD acquires language model developer Silo AI for $665M

OpenAI Startup Fund and Ariana Huffington’s Thrive Global join to launch personalized AI health coach

Storj Labs buys GPU cloud company Valdi to offer on-demand storage and compute for AI workloads

UiPath lays off 10% of workforce in push for increased efficiency

Investor consortium acquires majority stake in Nasuni at $1.2B valuation

Skild AI raises $300M to build a general-purpose, AI-powered brain for any robot

Hebbia reels in $130M for its AI search platform

Vision AI startup Hayden AI raises $90M to boost public transit efficiency

Healthcare AI platform Regard raises $61M to advance AI-powered clinical insights

Jared Leto joins Index Ventures in $60M round for generative AI video startup Captions

Fireworks AI raises $52M led by Sequoia at $522B valuation

HerculesAI reels in $26M for its AI-powered data management toolkit

Intel Capital leads $15M round in AI construction tech startup Buildots

AI data reliability startup Soda Data raises $14M

Enso Technologies raises $6M to build an army of guided AI agents for SMBs

Other news and analysis

What does ‘Apple Intelligence’ mean for the enterprise? TheCUBE ‘AI Insights and Innovation’ podcast analysis

Building the modern application platform: Industry veteran Bob Muglia forecasts rise of the knowledge graph

Salesforce powers new AI use cases with Data Cloud and integrated capabilities

Patronus AI open-sources Lynx, a real-time LLM-based judge of AI hallucinations

Salesforce pioneers application platform that unlocks generative AI and actions

Anthropic expands developer console for creating and evaluating AI prompts

Solo.io paves the way for smoother LLM connectivity with Gloo AI Gateway

Zeus Kerravala looks at big data in the Indy 500: Merging auto racing and high-tech data enables a faster ride for everyone

Check out more news on AI and data.

Around the enterprise

AWS announces wider release of next-generation Graviton4 custom chips for high-performance cloud workloads

Alphabet calls off multibillion-dollar HubSpot acquisition

US announces $1.6B to fund research in advanced chip packaging technologies

Defense technology startup Helsing raises €450M at reported €5B valuation

Oracle offers shared Exadata-as-a-service at dramatically lower cost than for full instances

Boomi centralizes API discovery, management and governance with new control plane

Mirantis upgrades its OpenStack distribution with performance, AI optimizations

Alluxio says it can achieve 97% GPU utilization across a distributed filesystem

We’ve got lots more news on cloud, infrastructure and related enterprise news.

Cyber beat: Funding surges (along with attacks)

Money matters

Investor confidence boosts cybersecurity funding to $3.3B in second quarter

Command Zero launches with $21M to speed up breach investigations

Tracebit lands $5M in funding to enable mass adoption of cyberthreat deception techniques

Attack and response

Closing the barn door and all that, but badly needed: Snowflake introduces mandatory multifactor authentication following recent cyberattacks

AT&T discloses data breach affecting ‘nearly all’ cellular customers

New APT group CloudSorcerer uses cloud services to target Russian government entities

Security vulnerability in NSA training tool allowed unauthorized content modifications

BlastRADIUS vulnerability exposes legacy security flaws in widely used RADIUS Protocol

Cisco Talos details latest tactics employed by prolific ransomware groups

New ‘RockYou2024’ password dump raises global cybersecurity alarms

New ‘FishXProxy’ phishing kit lowers entry bar for cyberattacks

RansomHub publishes stolen Florida Health Department data after ransom deadline passes

Justice Department seizes domains linked to Russian disinformation campaign

Plenty more SiliconANGLE news on cybersecurity here.

Elsewhere in tech

Apple will open access to its iOS payment system to end EU antitrust probe

Samsung debuts Fold 6, Flip 6 alongside new Galaxy Ring and Watch Ultra wearables

Apple reportedly preparing new Apple Watch with chip, display upgrades

Metaverse platform Infinite Reality raises $350M at $5.1B valuation and acquires Landvault

Standard Bots reels in $63M for its AI-powered robotic arms

Partior, blockchain payment network backed by JPMorgan and Standard Charter, raises $60M

Bitcoin starts to recover after Mt. Gox trustee disbursements causes price plunge

Immunefi and Ethereum Foundation partner on crowdsourced network audit to boost blockchain security

Delivery Hero shares drop ahead of potential €400M+ antitrust fine

Check out all our news on blockchain, policy and emerging tech.

Comings and goings

Qumulo appoints former Arista exec Doug Gourlay CEO, eyeing growth in data systems storage market

Microsoft, Apple give up observer seats on OpenAI’s board amid regulatory scrutiny

Former Rapid7 President and COO Andrew Burton is new CEO of commercetools. He succeeds co-founder and CEO Dirk Hoerig, who will remain on the board and become chief innovation officer.

Intuit to lay off 1,800 employees, plans to rehire in new AI and customer roles

Girls in Tech closes its doors after 17 years, per VentureBeat

What’s coming next

Earnings season gets underway with two key semiconductor industry reports:

July 17: ASML

July 18: TSMC

July 16-17: International Chief Data Officer and Information Quality (CDOIQ) Symposium: TheCUBE Research will be there.

July 30: Supercloud 7: Get Ready for the Next Data Platform: Our latest Supercloud editorial event will look at the foundation for the new AI era, with lots of executives, practitioners, analysts and entrepreneurs from startups to established companies. Here are some of the topics we’ll be exploring. And get up to speed with our special section ahead of the event.

Image: SiliconANGLE/Ideogram

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