AI
AI
AI
Uh-oh, accounting concerns circle the AI boom
As investors start to care about returns from all the spending on artificial intelligence, accounting is becoming a big topic of concern.
In his Breaking Analysis this week, Dave Vellante makes the case that GPUs have plenty of legs, quelling most concerns that lengthening depreciation times are a red flag. That said, Meta is particularly, shall we say, creative, when it comes to accounting for, or not accounting for, its multibillion-dollar spending on data centers.
Sharpening the concern over AI’s payoff is that the current generative approaches may soon reach their limit, as another AI expert opined this week.
Still, the AI we’ve got so far will pack quite a punch. As Paul Gillin writes in his latest feature, agentic AI soon will software like a tidal wave.
Meantime, it was full speed ahead this week on new models and tools from Anthropic, Microsoft and OpenAI, along with other activity. After Jeff Bezos scraped up some change under his couch cushions to raise $6.2 billion for his secretive industrial AI “startup” Project Prometheus, it turns out he has already made an acquisition. Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev also raised $120 million for Harmonic AI to eliminate hallucinations.
And AI is still helping enterprise tech providers, though to varying degrees. Dell and NetApp cleaned up on earnings, but HP fell short and announced thousands of layoffs, and Nutanix didn’t do so great either.
Amazon Web Services will hold its annual re:Invent confab next week, and I’m not revealing anything by saying it will be all about AI. Fair or not, Amazon has a bit to prove it can catch up in that realm to OpenAI — which some observers speculate it will announce a deal with — as well as partner Anthropic, Microsoft and a surging Google. But this week it announced it will invest $50 billion to expand AI and supercomputing capabilities for the U.S. government, so it’s hardly standing still. SiliconANGLE and theCUBE will be onsite at the event in Las Vegas with all the news, interviews and analysis.
Next week there’s also a post-Thanksgiving glut of earnings from Salesforce, Snowflake, HPE, UiPath, CrowdStrike, Pure Storage and more that should provide further insight into the sustainability of the AI boom.
Here’s all the enterprise and emerging tech news this week from SiliconANGLE and beyond:
AI and data: Accounting concerns hit AI
Analysis and food for thought
The end of apps? Imagining software’s agentic future
Breaking Analysis: Resetting GPU depreciation: Why AI factories bend, but don’t break, useful life assumptions It’s worrisome when accounting becomes a central issue in tech business, but here’s a good analysis of why new depreciation assumptions are one of the biggest problems.
AI meets aggressive accounting at Meta’s gigantic new data center (per the Wall Street Journal) This is pretty damning, especially coming from the reporter who first broke the iffy accounting at Enron back in 2000. Worth a careful read. “Artificial intelligence, meet artificial accounting.” Ouch!
Ilya Sutskever declares the scaling era dead. His $3B bet says research will win Another AI pioneer weighs in, following Yann LeCun last week. Hmm. If scaling isn’t the key, who needs all those data centers?
Money matters
Jeff Bezos’ Project Prometheus reportedly acquires AI startup General Agents
Harmonic AI raises $120M at $1.45B valuation to advance mathematical reasoning
Financial AI startup Model ML nabs $75M investment
Snowflake to acquire Select Star to expand Horizon Catalog’s view of enterprise data for next-gen AI
Overstory closes $43M round to scale AI-driven wildfire prevention and grid resilience
Cerrion raises $18M to support industrial automation with intelligent vision agents
Momentic raises $15M to become the AI-era ‘source of truth’ for software quality
Procure AI lands $13M in funding to automate business procurement tasks
Kovant wants to become the nerve center of enterprise agentic AI operations after pre-seed funding
New models and services
Anthropic releases new flagship Claude Opus 4.5 model
Microsoft debuts Fara-7B, a small ‘computer-use’ model that runs natively on PCs
OpenAI debuts ChatGPT Shopping Research tool for personalized product discovery
Amplitude lays out AI-native future as brands adapt to generative search
SUSE’s MCP Server tech preview lays foundation for AI-assisted Linux infrastructure
Arcade.dev and Anthropic advance MCP with new secure authorization flow
Policy
Warner Music inks Suno deal amid cooling tensions over AI-generated music
There’s even more AI and big data news on SiliconANGLE
Around the enterprise: Amazon’s $50B bet on government AI
Money matters
Amazon announces $50B investment to expand AI and supercomputing capabilities for US government
Nvidia shares drop on report Meta may buy AI chips from Google
Nuclear energy startup X-energy raises $700M in funding
Earnings
Dell’s stock rises on AI server demand, but HP slides after announcing layoffs and weak guidance
NetApp raises its full-year earnings and revenue forecast and its stock rises
Dismal revenue outlook crushes optimism around Nutanix and its stock tanks
Workday falls in late trading as growth outlook fails to excite investors
Zscaler reports strong quarter but cautious guidance weighs on shares
Zoom tops estimates with stronger enterprise sales and higher AI adoption
Autodesk earnings and revenue beat estimates, shares up 6%
PagerDuty earnings surpass estimates but stock falls 5%
New products and services
Chip startup Rapidus reportedly plans to build 1.4-nanometer fab
Kneron’s new AI chip brings LLM performance out of the cloud and onto devices
Firefly AI says it can make apps almost invulnerable to cloud outages
Mercy Ships, Presidio and Cisco partner at the intersection technology and purpose
Policy
EU moves to ban social media for kids under 16 who don’t have parents’ consent
We have lots more news on cloud, infrastructure and apps
Cyber beat: ServiceNow eyes Veza
Money matters
ServiceNow could reportedly acquire cybersecurity startup Veza for $1B+
Prominent tech executives back $36M round for cybersecurity startup Clover Security
Opti lands $20M to automate enterprise identity governance with AI
Agentic resiliency startup Vijil raises $17M to safeguard AI agents continuously
Attack & response
Mixpanel breach compromises some OpenAI API users’ account data
New ‘HashJack’ technique lets attackers manipulate AI assistants in Comet, Copilot and Gemini
Oligo report uncovers critical Fluent Bit flaws exposing cloud workloads
New products and services
Amazon details internal ATA cybersecurity automation system
Veeam makes the case for AI resilience
Hack The Box debuts HTB AI Range to test AI and human cyber defense side by side
Trend Micro previews security package for full-stack AI protection
Superwise expands agentic governance platform with new real-time guardrails
Elsewhere in tech: Karna gives stablecoins a boost
Digital bank Klarna launches stablecoin amidst rising crypto adoption
Paxos acquires crypto wallet startup Fordefi for $100M+
Execs say OpenAI has first hardware prototypes, plan to reveal device in two years or less
And check out more news on emerging tech, blockchain and crypto and policy
Comings and goings
Network digital twin technology firm Forward Networks appointed Bobby Condon chief revenue officer.
What’s next
Events
Dec. 1-5: AWS re:Invent, Las Vegas. SiliconANGLE and theCUBE will both be onsite at the big cloud event of the year with news, analysis and interviews.
Earnings: post-Thanksgiving glut
Monday, Dec. 1: MongoDB
Tuesday, Dec. 2: Pure Storage, CrowdStrike, Okta, Marvell, Box, GitLab, Asana
Wednesday, Dec. 3: Snowflake, Salesforce, UiPath, C3 AI
Thursday, Dec. 4: HPE, Rubrik, SentinelOne, Samsara, DocuSign, Domo
Image: SiliconANGLE/Reve
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