UPDATED 23:41 EDT / AUGUST 21 2025

AI

Investors worry about an AI bubble, but the money keeps flowing

Are we finally reaching peak AI?

Always hard to say, but investors are worried: U.S. tech stocks slid after Altman warned of a bubble, an MIT study raised doubts about how much AI is actually producing returns, and Meta was reportedly looking at cutting some AI spending, or at least freezing hiring for now. (Though it apparently has signed a $10 billion cloud deal with Google.)

Nonetheless, investment in AI startups and products doesn’t seem to be slowing down. In fact, startups and big tech companies are doubling down on delivering them more broadly. Workato (and many others), for instance, are looking to bring AI agents to the masses.

Speaking of big investments in AI and data, Databricks just refuses to go public, instead raising an undisclosed amount this week in a Series K round — didn’t know they went that high –that values it at a cool $100 billion. What is it really waiting for? Then there’s Anthropic, reportedly raising $10 billion.

SoftBank ponied up $2 billion to invest in Intel, and the U.S. looks to be taking a 10% stake in the venerable vulnerable chipmaker as payoff for the CHIPS Act funds it was already supposed to have gotten. Nobody except Trump and his people think it’s a good idea for the government to own pieces of private companies, even if we’d all be better off with a more stable Intel. Dave Vellante has a much better plan.

More crypto companies look to cash in on Trump’s more crypto-friendly policies, as Figure Technology and Gemini file to go public following Bullish’s very bullish IPO.

VMware Explore comes up next week in Las Vegas, kicking off the traditional end of the summer lull in tech events. Also up next week: marquee tech earnings reports from Nvidia — which will be very closely watched — Snowflake, Dell, CrowdStrike, MongoDB and more.

Here’s all the enterprise and emerging tech news and views this week from SiliconANGLE and beyond:

AI and data: Databricks hits $100B valuation

Food for thought

US tech stocks slide after Altman warns of ‘bubble’ in AI and MIT study doubts the hype

Microsoft AI chief tells us we should step back before creating AI that seems too human

Fastly report finds AI bots are reshaping the balance of web traffic

AI’s power drain: Google details Gemini apps’ environmental footprint in new paper

Money matters

Databricks’ valuation hits $100B with latest funding round

Anthropic reportedly in talks to raise $10B in new funding as AI boom continues apace

Robotics software startup FieldAI raises $405M in funding

Property management startup EliseAI nabs $250M at $2.2B valuation

KnowledgeLake raises $65M to bring AI-native synthetic labor to midsized enterprises and government agencies

IVIX raises $60M in funding for its financial crime detection platform

TinyFish raises $47M to expand deployment of enterprise web agents

Upstage bags $45M to expand its AI-native document intelligence suite to the US

Medallion raises $43M to streamline back-office paperwork for healthcare

Functionize nabs $41M to speed up software testing with AI

Casca gets $29M to bring AI-native loan origination tech to local banks

Bluefish raises $20M to help enterprise marketing take control in the era of AI chatbots

Firecrawl raises $14.5M to grow AI-ready web data infrastructure

Definite bags $10M in funding to replace clunky big data warehouses, connectors and BI tools

TensorZero raises $7.3M seed round to build open-source stack for industrial-grade LLM applications

DevOps automation startup SRE.ai launches with $7.2M in funding

Zipline AI raises $7M to ease AI data pipeline development

New models and services

Workato unveils a squad of agentic AI Genies for every major business function

Workato’s developer sandbox lets any company experience the power of agentic AI automation

Vast Data’s SyncEngine helps AI agents to tap unstructured data from every source

Mozilla.ai charts a new course with a turn toward profitability

Google opens AI Mode globally with more personalized agentic capabilities

Magic Research says its private AI platform cuts inference costs by 90%

Salesforce unleashes AI agents in City Hall

Atlas teams up with Google Cloud to launch its AI-native video game development platform

Confluent Cloud bring real-time data to AI agents

LambdaTest releases Agent-to-Agent testing platform to validate complex AI apps

Klaviyo launches enhanced MCP server to connect AI tools with customer data

IBM’s and NASA’s Surya AI model is designed to predict the next ‘Carrington-class’ solar storm

Lightning AI launches multicloud GPU marketplace to connect developers to compute infrastructure

Alation debuts Chat with Your Data to simplify enterprise access to structured insights

Groundcover debuts a dedicated observability tool for AI agents and LLMs

Grammarly leans into writing assistance agents for students and professionals

SUPERWISE launches ‘/collect’ AI tool for frontline data capture

Policy

AI chatbot scrutiny intensifies: Texas AG launches probe of Meta and Character.AI over misleading mental health claims

There’s even more AI and big data news on SiliconANGLE

Around the enterprise: The Intel hot potato

Money matters

Trump says US government will take 10% stake in Intel

But SoftBank actually offers the cash: SoftBank to take $2B stake in beleaguered chipmaker Intel

Meta reportedly inks $10B+ cloud deal with Google

Thoma Bravo to take HR software provider Dayforce private for $12.3B

Design software company Canva valued at $42B ahead of possible IPO

Workday’s stock falls on disappointing guidance and persistent concerns about AI threat

Zoom stock gains on stronger-than-expected earnings and revenue

Nuclear energy startup Aalo raises $100M in funding

Keychain reels in $30M to make CPG manufacturers more efficient

Policy

Nvidia looking to halt H20 chip production after China cracks down on purchases, reports say

New products and services

Google unveils Pixel 10 lineup and new AI assistance for its smartphones

Nvidia reportedly developing new, more powerful AI chip for sale in China

Nvidia expands AI capabilities with giga-scale networking and faster inference serving

AuthZed introduces AuthZed Cloud to simplify enterprise authorization

Cosmo by CodeSignal brings bite-sized AI and business training to mobile

We have lots more news on cloud, infrastructure and apps

Cyber beat: Google’s guardrails for AI agents

Attack & response

Prosecutors charge Rapper Bot administrator after targeting X and thousands more

Apple issues emergency update to fix unpatched flaw in ImageIO framework

Menlo Security research finds use of shadow AI is booming

February ransomware attacks hit record high as ThreatDown reports 25% annual surge

Darktrace reports attackers are hijacking SaaS accounts through rented virtual private server nodes

New services

Google Cloud adds new protections for AI agents and cloud workloads at Security Summit 2025

Ping Identity expands platform with integrated privileged access management

BrowserStack introduces Testing Toolkit Chrome extension to unify QA workflows

Money matters

SASE provider Netskope files to go public

F5 acquires MantisNet to expand cloud-native observability capabilities

Ontic raises $230M Series C round to redefine security through AI and connected security intelligence

Seemplicity raises $50M to expand AI driven exposure management platform

More cybersecurity news here

Elsewhere in tech: Crypto parties on

Crypto lending firm Figure Technology files for Nasdaq IPO Following crypto exchange Gemini’s plan revealed late Friday to go public and the debut of Bullish last week.

Nvidia, Uber join $97M investment in autonomous driving startup Nuro

Quantinuum announces new quantum programming language and emulation platform … and weighs raising more money at a $10 billion valuation, Bloomberg reported

US spy chief says UK has dropped backdoor order for Apple

And check out more news on emerging tech, blockchain and crypto and policy

Comings and goings

Palo Alto Networks founder Nir Zuk retires following strong fourth quarter

Arm hired Amazon AI chip director Rami Sinno to aid in-house effort (per Reuters)

OpenAI says HR chief Julia Villagra is leaving company

Oracle Chief Security Officer Mary Ann Davidson, who joined in 1988 and became the company’s first CSO, is leaving as part of a recent reorganization (per Bloomberg)

Christopher Kirchhoff has joined Scale AI as head of applied AI strategy and global security.

What’s next

Events

Aug. 25-27: VMware Explore, Las Vegas. TheCUBE will be onsite for interviews and analysis, and SiliconANGLE will have all the news.

Earnings

Tuesday, Aug. 26: Box, MongoDB, Okta

Wednesday, Aug. 27: Nvidia, Nutanix, NetApp, Pure Storage, Snowflake, HP, CrowdStrike

Thursday, Aug. 28: Dell, Marvell, Elastic, SentinelOne, Autodesk

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