Data centers must be the most boring buildings in the world to look at, but it’s hard to keep our eyes off them these days.

Anthropic said this week it’s going to spend $50 billion on data centers just in the U.S. Meta just did a $3 billion deal with Nebius — and the only reason it wasn’t much bigger being that Nebius doesn’t have the capacity yet. Microsoft brought its multibillion-dollar “super factory” online in Atlanta. And Google just today announced it will spend $40 billion on data centers in Texas.

Meanwhile, investors seem to have an unquenchable desire to invest in OpenAI wannabes that need all that compute too. Elon Musk’s xAI may (or may not) be raising $15 billion, while Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab is raising billions at a $50 billion-plus valuation.

The unending AI factory buildout, not to mention unending $100 million-plus rounds for AI startups, are intensifying the debate over whether there’s an AI bubble — or, more accurately, how much of the economy goes down when it pops. Yes, I know you’re tired of hearing the B word. The potential for a payoff is there — just ask SoftBank, which just traded its profits in Nvidia to pay for its OpenAI investment — but it’s years down the road at best. So just be careful out there.

Here’s a new AI company to keep a close eye on, and not just because it’s the brainchild of AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li: World Labs just launched Marble, a commercial world model for generating entire virtual environments. It’s a big deal potentially because everyone knows, or should know, that language models have their limits — humans learn most of what they do not from language but from moving through and sensing the real world. Still, even LLMs continue to improve, at least for now, as OpenAI came out with friendlier and better-reasoning models this week.

Maybe Kubernetes, the orchestrator for modern software components, has almost receded into plumbing by now, but KubeCon remains an essential conference for cloud-native and open-source computing. This year Red Hat and Google dominated the big stories, but we have a lot more coverage below of how the whole cloud-native software stack is getting reinvented for AI.

Cisco Systems might finally be on a roll thanks to its focus on AI infrastructure, as it beat on earnings for the fourth straight quarter. But there’s bound to be hiccups, as CoreWeave found out.

Next week’s earnings will be dominated by Nvidia, which always has outsized expectations to meet. And cybersecurity followers will be keenly interested to see how Palo Alto Networks does.

Next week we’ll be covering Microsoft Ignite in San Francisco and SC25 in St. Louis. Stay tuned here and on theCUBE.net for all the news and insights.

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

AI and data: The money spigot’s open — but for how long?

Analysis and food for thought

Breaking Analysis: AI factories face a long payback period but trillions in upside

And another perspective from Michael Burry, though perhaps not quite as worrisome as he makes it sound: The Big Short dude is worried about Big Tech earnings

Then again: The AI Boom Is Looking More and More Fragile (per the Wall Street Journal)

For example: Wall Street cools on Oracle’s buildout plans as debt concerns mount: ‘AI sentiment is waning’

Who’s financing all these AI factories: Three AI Megadeals Are Breaking New Ground on Wall Street (per the WSJ)

And let’s not forget China is clawing its way into AI: The AI Cold War That Will Redefine Everything (per the WSJ)

Money matters

SoftBank offloads $5.8B stake in Nvidia to free up cash for OpenAI investment

Musk’s xAI raises $15B in latest funding round (per CNBC), though Musk later called the report ‘false’

Sources: Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab in early talks to raise a new funding at $50B+ (per Bloomberg)

Nvidia, Google back $2.3B round for AI code editor startup Cursor

Snowflake acquires database migration startup Datometry

Anthropic is on track to turn a profit much faster than OpenAI (per the Wall Street Journal)

Clio secures $500M Series G round as it completes vLex acquisition

Alembic Technologies raises $145M and buys an Nvidia-powered supercomputer to accelerate ‘causal AI’

Salesforce acquires AI search startup Doti for reported $100M

Former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal’s Al startup Parallel raises $100 million

Wonderful raises $100M to scale multilingual enterprise AI agents worldwide

Scribe raises $75M for its process documentation platform

CoLab gets $72M in funding to capture the knowledge of the world’s best engineers

Legal AI platform GC AI raises $60M at $555M valuation

AI analytics startup WisdomAI nabs $50M investment

Tavus, which says it’s creating AI models that teach machines to “see, feel and act the way people do,” raises $40M in Series B funding

1mind launches with $30M to advance AI Superhumans for sales and customer engagement

Kaltura acquires eSelf, founded by creator of Snap’s AI, in $27M deal

Spectral Compute raises $6M to fix CUDA and eliminate the ‘Nvidia tax’ on AI applications

Legal AI startup Theo Ai lands $3.4M to grow its predictive litigation tools

New models and services

OpenAI’s GPT-5.1 model gets a personality makeover and superior reasoning skills

World Labs launches Marble, a commercial world model for generating entire virtual environments

Google details cloud-based Private AI Compute system for securing Pixel data

Google Photos adds support for Nano Banana-powered AI editing features

Google DeepMind’s SIMA 2 agent learns to think and act inside virtual worlds

Dremio Cloud debuts an agentic data lakehouse operated by AI agents

DP World Tour partners with AWS to change the European golf experience

Webflow expands beyond design with new AI tool for building full-stack web applications

PitchBook brings generative AI to private markets with Navigator and ChatGPT integration

Amplitude launches AI Feedback to turn customer input into actionable product insights

Policy

EU set to relax data protection rules to boost AI growth Because it’s not fast enough already? 🙄

Amazon and Microsoft back effort that would restrict Nvidia’s exports to China

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

Around the enterprise: AI rewrites the computing stack

Money matters

Anthropic to spend $50B on US data center infrastructure

Google to spend $40B on data center infrastructure in Texas

Nebius inks $3B data center deal with Meta after missing revenue expectations

Rumble plans to acquire AI infrastructure company Northern Data to expand cloud operations

AI infrastructure startup Firmus raises $327M to build data centers in Australia

Cisco to acquire AI startup NeuralFabric for generative AI push

AMD snaps up MK1 to accelerate inference and reasoning on Instinct GPUs

Speaking of AMD, CEO Lisa Su sees 35% annual sales growth driven by ‘insatiable’ AI demand

Despite the hype of 5G, there’s still big demand for high-density Wi-Fi

Chip startup d-Matrix raises $275M to speed up inference with in-memory compute

Majestic Labs launches with $100M to build memory-dense AI servers

AI-powered visual presentation platform Gamma raises $68M at $2.1B valuation

With $50M round, Exowatt has a rock-solid plan to provide cheap, abundant energy for AI data centers

AI startup Code Metal is going beyond vibe coding with the help of $36 million in fresh capital

Embrace acquires web performance startup SpeedCurve to expand user-focused observability

Earnings

Cisco’s focus on AI infrastructure pays off with strong earnings and revenue beat

CoreWeave’s stock wavers on data center delay and lower revenue forecast

GlobalFoundries stock falls after earnings beat. It gets harder from here.

Applied Materials beats forecasts and predicts higher AI chip demand in 2026, but stock falls anyway

Despite strong revenue growth, Circle Internet Group shares fall 11% on potential interest-rate decline

Rigetti Computing reports mixed Q3 results and shares fall

Coverage from KubeCon

The analysts’ view: Kubernetes and AI bond tightens around hardware, observability challenges

Google debuts new open-source AI tools, GKE Pod Snapshots

Red Hat strengthens OpenShift with AI, security and virtualization upgrades

Red Hat Linux gets offline management, quantum threat mitigation and new AI features

Devtron’s new AI agent optimizes Kubernetes performance and cost so humans don’t have to

Sysdig advances open-source cloud security with enhanced Falco threat investigation tools

Groundcover launches automated Observability Migration Tool to free teams from vendor lock-in

Traefik Labs unveils application intelligence platform spanning VMs, containers and serverless

New products and services

Microsoft brings Atlanta-based AI ‘super factory’ online

Google launches virtual app delivery solution to close the legacy software gap

Freshworks adds new AI upgrades to Freshservice and Freshdesk to cut service complexity

Tsavorite takes on Nvidia with composable AI chiplets based on Arm’s Neoverse architecture

Chronosphere launches AI-Guided Troubleshooting to accelerate root-cause analysis

We have lots more news on cloud, infrastructure and apps

Cyber beat: AI vs. AI

Attack & response

Anthropic reveals first reported ‘AI-orchestrated cyber espionage’ campaign using Claude

Google launches aggressive legal and legislative offensive to shut down global scam rings

New products and services

Commvault launches Cloud Unity platform to unify data security, recovery and identity resilience

Google expands its security ecosystem with new Unified Security Recommended program

Aryaka launches Unified SASE as a Service 2.0 to secure remote work and AI adoption

JFrog debuts Shadow AI Detection to expose hidden AI models and API usage

Black Duck introduces AI model scanning to tackle hidden and obfuscated AI components

Cyware expands Quarterback AI with new AI Fabric for unified threat intelligence

TrojAI launches Defend for MCP to secure agentic AI workflows

Money matters

Sweet Security raises $75M to expand runtime cloud and AI protection platform

Guardicore founders launch Tenzai with $75M seed round to build autonomous ‘hacker’ AI

Humanix raises $18M to expand AI platform that blocks social engineering attacks

More cybersecurity news here

Elsewhere in tech: IBM makes more quantum leaps

IBM unveils Loon and Nighthawk, next-generation processors for scalable, fault-tolerant quantum computing

Quantum software startup Classiq raises new funding from AMD, Qualcomm

All aboard: Top US regulators sound more bullish than ever about moving ahead with crypto initiatives

Crypto asset manager Grayscale files for IPO in the US

Couchbase enhances mobile platform with JavaScript support and peer-to-peer synchronization

Ethereum-based trading protocol Lighter raises $68M at $1.5B valuation

Harbinger raises $160M to build electric trucks for FedEx

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

Comings and goings: AI musical chairs

Yann LeCun’s exit highlights tensions in Meta’s shifting AI strategy

Sachin Katti, Intel’s chief technology and artificial intelligence officer, is leaving to build out OpenAI‘s compute infrastructure for artificial general intelligence.

Zetaris, maker of a lakehouse for AI, has a new chief technology officer: former Hitachi Vantara CTO of Emerging Technologies Michael Hay.

Synopsys will cut 10% of workforce and close sites in restructuring.

Cybersecurity firm Deepwatch laid off dozens, citing move to ‘accelerate’ AI investment.

What’s next

Events

Nov. 16-21: SC25, St. Louis. TheCUBE will be there with interviews and analysis Nov. 18-21 and SiliconANGLE will have the news.

Nov. 18-21: Microsoft Ignite, San Francisco: SiliconANGLE will have all the news and theCUBE will be onsite for interviews and analysis.

Earnings

Wednesday, Nov. 19: Nvidia, Palo Alto Networks

Thursday, Nov. 20: Elastic

Image: SiliconANGLE/Reve