Investors think AI is going to kill or at least maim software-as-a-service companies, and a lot more.

That seems a tad early, frankly, even if AI could slow SaaS’ growth story — which is why the likes of ServiceNow, Salesforce and even Palantir have seen their stocks hammered.

As Dare Obasanjo, a former longtime Microsoft software engineer, put it succinctly, “Wall Street has gone from thinking AI is a bubble to thinking AI is an iceberg and the software industry is the Titanic. … As usual wall street is a bunch of clueless fratboys who have no idea how the pieces they gamble with work.” Onetime Microsoft exec Steve Sinofsky isn’t buying it either: “Death of software. Nah. … There will more be software than ever before.”

And the overreaction is a little odd coming at the same time that investors also are increasingly wary of AI companies and their massive spending on infrastructure and whether ROI will justify it. Alphabet, for instance, logged a fabulous quarter that put to rest the notion that AI would kill its business — but its stock declined 4% the next day after it said capital spending is going even higher. Same at Amazon, only its shares fell almost 10% after-hours Thursday. Oracle remains under pressure, especially after saying it’s going to raise $50 billion to build more. And Microsoft last week freaked out investors with its planned capex — though Dave Vellante thinks they’re wrong.

Still, all this hasn’t much affected investment in AI disruptors such as ElevenLabs. And even AI chipmakers such as IPO-bound Cerebras and Positron keep getting bucketloads of funding, as investors (their investors, at least) bet that the shortage of graphics processing units that power the AI boom leaves room and margin for alternatives to Nvidia.

Meanwhile, it’s a scrum in AI business models, as OpenAI aims to try advertising to pay those fearsome bills — and Google already is — while Anthropic says, “Nope!” with a series of ads ripping the idea of ads on chatbots. Meanwhile, the two independent leaders continue to battle with new models.

There’s so much going on in AI that Elon Musk’s announcement of that his SpaceX will buy his xAI before, oh yeah, going public later this year got only a day or two’s news attention.

Waymo looks to press its advantage over everyone else in self-driving cars, in particular Musk’s Tesla, with plans to raise $16 billion.

Bellwether earnings next week: Cisco, Arista, Cloudflare, Applied Materials, Check Point Software and Datadog.

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

AI and data: AI winners and losers

Analysis and food for thought

Microsoft investors fret as capital spending and Azure growth decouple But they’re overreacting, Vellante says.

The threat of new AI tools wiped $300B off software and data stocks this week — wait, make that $1 trillion. They’re also likely overreacting, at least for the short term.

AI agents could crush enterprise infrastructure, says Cockroach Labs CEO

Agents in the enterprise: Salesforce and DeepL see productivity move the needle as use cases grow for AI

Five thoughts – plus a comment on the importance of leadership – from Cisco’s 2026 AI Summit: I could only attend online, but this had quite the blockbuster lineup, as Zeus Kerravala notes, gently aimed at positioning Cisco at the center of AI infrastructure and (with its growing cybersecurity portfolio) AI trust. A few other tidbits that struck me:

• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman thinks that even as large language models keep getting 10 times better every year, physical AI could be next, ultimately with billions of robots — that’s billions with a b.
• But even though you wouldn’t be surprised to hear Fei-Fei Li, CEO of “spatial intelligence” startup World Labs, say that’s the next big thing, she does warn that the relative paucity of data to feed these new world models is a significant challenge, at least until they get used and then start producing more data, in a positive loop. “The ability to understand and reason and navigate the 3-D physical world is the … next frontier of AI,” she said.
• Box CEO Aaron Levie said he understands why investors are cautious about software companies. “You’re going to see more competition in software” as “agents will do some things we do in software.” But, he said, “we’re not going to vibe-code our own CRM system” because the payoff is low compared with using agents to do entirely new things that couldn’t be done before. “Use agents to be more ambitious,” he advised. “That will be the future of the economy.”
• Data centers in space? Elon’s big claims didn’t seem to impress AWS CEO Matt Garman. “Humanity has yet to build a permanent structure in space,” he noted. Plus, it’s really expensive to get stuff into space and there aren’t nearly enough rockets to do it. “That’s a ways off,” he concluded. Back on Earth, Garman’s more concerned about U.S. companies being able to participate in sovereign cloud opportunities in other countries. “They say, “We trust you, I’m not sure we trust your country. They worry if the U.S. turns them off.” Yikes.
• The biggest worry for Anthropic Labs’ lead Mike Krieger? “Not taking advantage of AI because of human processes getting in the way.”
• Not surprisingly, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang doesn’t worry about much, including what he says is the ridiculous notion that AI kills traditional software. He’s also not worried about showing ROI for AI — of course, Nvidia clearly has plenty of R — but he says others shouldn’t either, because a new tool is very hard to value in a spreadsheet. “We have a thousand things going” in AI, he said. “It’s out of control, but it’s great.” 

Claude is a space to think, says Anthropic, by which it says it won’t put advertising on its chatbot, in stark contrast to OpenAI’s apparent plans: Anthropic’s hilarious Super Bowl spot skewers potential AI ads – but OpenAI chief Sam Altman protests

How often do AI chatbots lead users down a harmful path? Relatively rarely, but still too much.

Money matters

Voice AI startup ElevenLabs more than triples valuation in $500M round

Skyryse raises $300M+ for its AI flight control system

Fundamental launches with $255M and an AI model optimized for tabular data

Snowflake bypasses Microsoft to strike $200M multiyear deal with OpenAI

Goodfire raises $150M in funding to enhance its AI interpretability platform

Resolve AI raises $125M at $1B valuation to automate application maintenance

Shield AI raises $100M to acquire more managed service providers

Fieldguide raises $75M on $700M valuation to scale agentic AI for audit and advisory firms

AI-native accounting platform Accrual raises $75M in funding

IBM invests in generative AI app design startup Anima

OpenText to divest Vertica for $150M

GenLogs secures $60M to keep tabs on trucking industry with AI and roadside sensors

Alaffia Health raises $55M to expand agentic AI for health plan claims operations

Adaption Labs, which aims to enable continuously learning AI models with less fuss, raises $50M

Turnstile launches with $29M to bring AI-first quote-to-cash to business SaaS companies

Nixtla raises $16M Series A to advance its foundation model for time series forecasting

AI startup Phylo nabs $13.5M for its ‘integrated biology environment’

Raising $6.1M in seed funding, Airrived says agentic AI’s breakthrough moment has arrived

Expert Intelligence raises $4.7M to automate decision-making in laboratory environments

New models and services

OpenAI launches Codex app for macOS to speed up software projects

OpenAI introduces Frontier agent management platform and new GPT-5.3-Codex model

Anthropic rolls out Claude Opus 4.6 with 1 million-token context support

Snowflake bets on platform-native AI as enterprises rethink custom development

Dassault and Nvidia partner to build industrial AI platform

Higgsfield launches ‘vibe’ editor for creating motion graphics

Augment Code makes its semantic coding capability available for any AI agent

Clearnote debuts legal AI platform for music and entertainment professionals

Corti launches multi-agent AI framework for healthcare

Umanitek launches Guardian Agent to tackle AI hallucinations, deepfakes and identity abuse

Portal26 targets weak enterprise AI returns with new Value Realization platform

Analysis

From RFID to real-time AI: How a decade of AWS and NFL Next Gen Stats has rewritten the playbook

Around the enterprise: Alphabet and Amazon capex freaks out investors

Earnings

Alphabet to jack up AI spending as Google Cloud and ad business revenues shine

Amazon’s stock falls after it ups its 2026 capital spending forecast to $200B

Palantir rallies as revenue jumps 70% and guidance leaves Wall Street behind

Shares of Qualcomm and Arm slide following latest earnings reports

NXP beats expectations and its forecast is bullish, but investors shrug

AMD beats expectations but guidance fails to excite investors and stock falls

Supermicro knocks it out of the park, as AI server sales drive 120% revenue increase

Atlassian shares slide as cloud growth outlook tempers strong earnings beat

Cybersecurity earnings season kicks off with beats from Fortinet, NetScout and Qualys

Tenable pops after blowout earnings and bullish 2026 outlook

Synaptics surpasses Q1 earnings and revenue estimates

Gen Digital beats expectations by a penny a share

Uber gives soft forecast, financial chief to step down

Snap shares rise on fourth-quarter earnings that beat on sales

Reddit issues strong guidance and announces $1 billion buyback

More money matters

Oracle unveils $50B fundraising plan to fuel AI data center ambitions

Cerebras raises $1B more for its wafer-size AI chip

Memory mania: How a once-in-four-decades shortage is fueling a memory boom: Dylan Patel et. al. from SemiAnalysis dig in and conclude: We’re not even near the peak.

Texas Instruments to acquire Silicon Labs in deal valued at $7.5B

Positron AI raises $230M at over $1B valuation to build energy-efficient AI accelerator hardware

Gruve, a provider of AI inference services and infrastructure, raises $50M Series A follow-on round

New products and services

The network is the new production truck: Why NBC Sports is betting big on AI networking for the 2026 Winter Games

Western Digital outlines new HDD capacity, performance and power gains for AI workloads

SolarWinds bets on partners with richer incentives and deeper enablement

Cyber beat: Moltbook’s gaping security holes

Attack & response

AI agent social network Moltbook left millions of credentials publicly exposed

Securonix warns of Dead#Vax malware campaign abusing Windows fileless execution

New services

Identity intelligence firm Fingerprint launches AI agent signature ecosystem for the web

Operant AI debuts Agent Protector to secure autonomous AI agents at scale

Money matters

Zscaler snaps up SquareX to strengthen browser security without enterprise browsers

Semperis acquires MightyID to extend identity resilience across cloud identity platforms

RapidFort raises $42M to push continuous remediation for software supply chain security

Orion Security raises $32 million to advance autonomous data loss prevention

Radicl secures $31M to expand AI-driven security operations for small businesses

Nullify raises $12.5M to scale AI workforce for product security

Elsewhere in tech: Musk does his megamerger

Elon Musk confirms SpaceX has acquired xAI to accelerate his space-based data center plans

Alphabet’s robotaxi startup Waymo looks to raise $16B at $110B valuation

X’s Paris HQ raided by French cybercrime officers over Grok chatbot

Satellite maker CesiumAstro raises $470M to grow its manufacturing capacity

Bedrock Robotics raises $270M to scale autonomous construction fleets

LimX raises $200M to build embodied intelligence for humanoid robotics

Tomorrow.io raises $175M to deploy its AI-native weather satellite constellation

TRM Labs raises $70M at $1B valuation as demand surges for blockchain intelligence

Comings and goings

PayPal appointed HP boss Enrique Lores as CEO after disappointing quarter Onetime PayPal President David Marcus explained what happened to PayPal. Meantime, HP must scramble to find a permanent CEO (if there’s ever such a thing).

Customer experience firm Qualtrics appointed former Oracle and NetSuite exec Jason Maynard CEO.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy named Dharmesh Mehta, VP of Worldwide Selling Partner Services, as his new technical advisor, a role that often leads to high leadership positions in the company (Jassy was Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ technical advisor back in the day). Amit Agarwal, SVP of International Emerging Stores, will expand his role to lead Selling Partner Services.

Microsoft brought back executive Hayete Gallot, who left Google recently, to run cybersecurity, as Charlie Bell takes a new “engineering quality” role (per CNBC).

Workday said it’s laying off about 400 people, 2% of its workforce.

Former Portworx and Pure Storage exec Venkat Ramakrishnan was named president and chief operating officer of NeuBird AI, an agentic AI site reliability engineering firm.

One Identity appointed former Smartsheet exec Gihan Munasinghe chief technology officer.

Ryan Aytay has left as president and CEO of the Salesforce company Tableau after 19 years at the business intelligence firm.

Rubrik promoted Americas President Jesse Green to chief revenue officer, replacing departing Brian McCarthy.

What’s next

Earnings:

Monday, Feb. 9: Kyndryl, Dynatrace

Tuesday, Feb. 10: Datadog, Cloudflare, Teradata, Lyft, Robinhood, Freshworks, Rapid7, Lattice Semi

Wednesday, Feb. 11: Cisco, Pegasystems, GlobalFoundries, Confluent, Fastly, Hubspot

Thursday, Feb. 12: Check Point Software, Applied Materials, Arista, Twilio, JFrog, Coinbase

Image: SiliconANGLE/Reve