AI
AI
AI
Nvidia bags Hugging Face, AI models play leapfrog and CrowdStrike doubles down on AI
Perhaps it’s no surprise that Nvidia ended up embracing open artificial intelligence model archive Hugging Face this week following more than a week of rumors. Even at almost $13 billion, it may end up being a steal — especially for a company that had $24 billion in cash flow last quarter alone.
The reason: Hugging Face is essentially the front door to open-source models that developers use to create applications and make them work best on specific AI chips. Although Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who told said the company won’t favor its own AI chips, Hugging Face still provides big benefits for Nvidia. “A thriving ecosystem of thousands of specialized models generates more aggregate compute demand than a handful of dominant closed APIs, and it hedges Nvidia against Meta Platforms, OpenAI and Microsoft building their own accelerators,” noted analyst Zeus Kerravala.
Meanwhile, the breakneck AI model leapfrog race continued this week as Google, Meta, Anthropic, OpenAI and World Labs released new versions.
Given that AI agents keep going rogue, it’s surely a good thing that cybersecurity companies such as CrowdStrike, which held its annual Fal.Con conference this week in Las Vegas, are scrambling to take advantage of the increasingly critical need to secure those models. It doubled down on AI by launching, among many other products, its own security frontier models. After all, CEO George Kurtz told SiliconANGLE, the AI control plane is the next frontier for cybersecurity.
SoftBank’s AI infrastructure unit is going public — with zero revenue. Right, please keep trying to convince me this isn’t a bubble. Maybe it’ll work out given all that AI demand and some specific big contracts, but … me, I think I’ll stick with index mutual funds (realizing they’re rather overexposed to big tech and AI already).
Google won another antitrust case, more or less, as a court ruled it doesn’t have to divest its business that places ads on other websites.
VMware hasn’t disappeared completely in the bowels of Broadcom yet, giving enterprises more control over their AI by introducing VMware Private AI Cloud this week at its Explore conference in Las Vegas.
AI continues to drive a lot of upside in tech earnings results, while also putting to bed the notion of the SaaSpocalypse. Again, though, investors were choosy, rewarding some such as Snowflake, Dell and GitLab but not almost equally positive results from Broadcom, HPE, NetApp, UiPath and MongoDB.
Just two major earnings reports next week: Oracle and Adobe. As for other events, there’s a brief lull until Sept. 15, when Salesforce holds its annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, and concurrently a lot of AI leaders flock to the AI Infra Summit in Santa Clara. SiliconANGLE will be covering both onsite.
Here’s all the enterprise and emerging-tech news and analysis this week from SiliconANGLE and beyond:
Analysis, opinion and food for thought
Bank of England governor warns of AI-related financial system risks 😬
VC isn’t VC anymore — understanding the rise of Cancer Capital Longtime entrepreneur Anil Dash says (many) venture capitalists have utterly lost the plot: “We must understand that it is no longer a financial machine that is used to fund startups, but a political and social machine focused on dismantling democracy and civil society. And it’s time to act accordingly.” Say what you really think, Anil!
Big Tech blinded itself to the grassroots AI revolt (per the Wall Street Journal) And still is, it seems.
NYC officials ban AI in the classroom until high school — and so does Los Angeles.
We tested how AI chatbots would handle foreign propaganda. They did surprisingly well (per NPR) Better than search engines or AI summaries. Earth to Google.
Why the next wave of AI startups won’t optimize infrastructure – until they have to
Four safeguards to stop your AI agents from going rogue
AI and data: Nvidia ❤️ Hugging Face
New models and services
OpenAI starts rolling out its next-generation GPT-6 Astra model
Anthropic launches Claude Fable 5.1 after inking $35B cloud deal with Lambda
Meta introduces Muse Voice Transcribe
Google launches two Gemini 3.8 models with cutting-edge reasoning capabilities
Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs debuts Atlas, a world model showcase for advanced spatial intelligence
Nvidia PAIR makes it easy to create a household data center for running agentic AI tasks
Capsule Security fine-tunes Nvidia Nemotron models to stop rogue AI agents
OpenAI’s Astra model is coming, and it’s very good at breaking into computer systems
Experian expands into AI agents with ServiceNow partnership
OpenClaw just gave everyone version 2.0 and it comes with major updates
Phonely launches Alma, a voice AI model trained on 10M+ phone conversations
Orchestra launches management solution for enterprise data and AI
ZeroDrift launches service to check agent-generated messages against company policies
CBTS launches Forge Agents to build custom AI agents in days
Celigo launches intelligent enterprise automation builder into general availability
Money matters
Nvidia confirms $12.9B acquisition of AI hosting platform Hugging Face Analysis by Zeus Kerravala: Nvidia’s Hugging Face deal is a bet on open models — and proof it’s no longer just a chip company
A16z told investors Thinking Machines Lab is in talks to raise $5B-$6B led by Accel; Nvidia is expected to invest ~$2.5B (per The Information)
OpenAI says its ad business has already hit $1B in annualized revenue
Wonderful raises $550M at $5B valuation for its AI automation platform
Sales and marketing AI startup Clay raising at $7B pre-money valuation
Physical Superintelligence raises $58M for “world’s most advanced physics lab, staffed by virtual physicists”
Resect launches with $25M to reduce hallucinations in AI models
Aslan raises $20.8M for AI undercover agents
Aranya raises $11M to turn bare-metal servers into AI clusters in less than 48 hours
DataAgent raises $10M to let AI fix production faults inside Kubernetes clusters
Around the enterprise: AI keeps boosting everyone, if not their stocks
Earnings
Dell’s AI servers sell like hotcakes again, driving a stunning earnings beat
Broadcom beats expectations as AI labs double down on custom chips
AI demand lifts HPE and NetApp to record quarters, but investors sell both
Palo Alto Networks beats estimates but margin concerns send shares lower
Zscaler beats Q4 estimates but shares hold flat after-hours
MongoDB delivers stellar earnings and revenue beat, but its stock tanks anyway
GitLab stock jumps 17% as it beats Q2 earnings and revenue estimates
Snowflake knocks it out the park with a stellar earnings and revenue beat
UiPath beats on revenue but its stock tanks after-hours
Asana shares tumble on weak third quarter earnings outlook
Docusign raises sales view on higher Q2 revenue
Samsara soars on strong earnings beat and solid guide
C3.ai stock falls 5% on weak Q2 revenue guidance despite Q1 beat
Sprinklr stock falls 7% amid 1% revenue growth, despite AI platform push
Other money matters
Microsoft to start disclosing Azure quarterly revenue as company consolidates business units Finally.
SoftBank’s SB Energy AI infrastructure unit files to go public
HR software startup HiBob raises $166M after annualized revenue tops $400M
Spain’s iPronics raises $125 million from Nvidia, others for data center networking chips
SciFin launches with $44M to help revenue teams close the ‘context gap’
Adobe acquires Indian market intelligence startup Rilo (per TechCrunch)
AI infra startup Wafer raises $40M at $200M valuation, turns down acquisition offers
Empirik launches with $21M to predict tech outages before they happen
New products and services
Coverage of VMware Explore:
Broadcom’s VMware Private AI Cloud spans infrastructure, agents, data and security
And analysis from theCUBE Research’s Paul Nashawaty: VMware Explore 2026 wrap-up: Private cloud becomes the operating layer for enterprise AI
And David Linthicum: Enterprise AI readiness trails the hype amid agentic rush
AWS targets data-intensive workloads with Graviton5-powered R9g and R9gd instances
Policy
In landmark ruling, court declines to break up Google’s advertising business
FTC, 22 states sue Amazon over e-commerce advertising practices
Cyber beat: CrowdStrike doubles down on AI
Coverage from CrowdStrike Fal.Con
Table-setter from Dave Vellante: Breaking Analysis: CrowdStrike’s post-Mythos surge: Moat, momentum and the blast-radius test
CrowdStrike launches Falcon IQ as Falcon lands on Google Cloud and Snowflake
CrowdStrike builds security frontier models with Nvidia and opens an AI lab
CrowdStrike launches Falcon Guardian to police AI agents at the endpoint
CrowdStrike gives AI agents an identity provider, parallel SOC investigations and package blocking
Straight from the CEO: George Kurtz says the AI control plane is CrowdStrike’s next security frontier
Jazz brings its agentic DLP investigator to CrowdStrike’s Falcon Foundry
Attack & response
Report: OpenAI agents took over a website, used it to collaborate on benchmarks
New services
Cloudflare launches Adaptive Intelligence to rewrite bot rules on the fly
Cloudflare taps OpenAI’s cyber models to find and block code flaws
OpenMatter adds an AI model gateway and privacy-preserving machine learning
Filigran adds attack chaining to OpenAEV for automated penetration testing
Money matters
Upwind reels in $300M for its cloud security platform
As AI security concerns rise, HiddenLayer raises $100M and Huskeys bags $27M
AIR Security launches with $50M to build a firewall for AI agents
Guardio raises $40M at $1.1B valuation to enhance consumer cybersecurity
Thoma Bravo-owned Proofpoint in advanced talks to buy Varonis
Pistachio acquires Hugin.io to launch cybersecurity compliance platform
Lasso Security launches CPU-only AI guardrail, raises $30M
Elsewhere in tech: Oura to go public
Smart ring maker Oura files for IPO as revenue jumps 74%
Lyte raises $165M at $1.6B valuation to bring accurate perception to robots
Self-driving truck firm PlusAI takes third run at listing, this time at $800M
AITAN raises $41 million to take Israeli combat drone technology global
IBM Ventures backs BQP as quantum-accelerated simulation reaches production
Critical Munitions Group raises $10.3M to automate the production of military-grade explosives
Comings and goings
Apple‘s Phil Schiller is scaling back his role as Tim Cook becomes executive chairman and the John Ternus era begins. Also, sources told the New York Times that Laura Legros, an Apple hardware VP who retired in 2022, has rejoined Apple.
AI visionary Ray Kurzweil is joining Subsense, a Palo Alto startup developing a brain computer system that involves snorting nanoparticles (per Fortune).
Uber is laying off 10% of staff, or 3,300 people.
Adobe chose Anil Chakravarthy, president of its customer experience orchestration and worldwide field operations, as its next president and CEO, succeeding Shantanu Narayen, who announced he would step down earlier this year.
Aerospike named Don Dama CEO to lead next generation of enterprise data and AI infrastructure.
Former Google VP Sunil Potti has joined Cisco to lead its security, observability and data platform teams, bringing Cisco’s security and Splunk businesses together under one leader.
Observability company Sumo Logic hired a new chief revenue officer: former Applause Chief Operating Officer and CRO Tom Bonos.
Customer service agent firm Sierra named former Pinterest Chief Financial Officer Julia Brau Donnelly CFO.
Redfin filled its CEO role with former Meta VP Alessio Sanfilippo after its acquisition by Rocket (per GeekWire).
What’s next
Earnings
Wednesday, Sept. 9: Sailpoint
Thursday, Sept. 10: Oracle, Adobe
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