What a turnaround for nuclear power — and it’s all thanks to artificial intelligence.

This week two more Big Tech companies bet on nukes as Google and Amazon joined the party Microsoft started a few weeks ago. All that training of AI models takes a lot of power. And that’s despite, or because of, the fact that AI models are getting smaller and easier to use, as a raft of announcements this week made apparent.

AI is also exploding the data center, as all the talk at the Open Compute Project’s Global Summit this week was about accommodating AI workloads — such as Crusoe’s plans for building an AI megafactory in Texas — and the massive increase in power, heat and networking needs they require. Indeed, as a result, networking is the not-so-new but now critical bottleneck in the data center. Companies such as Lightmatter and xScape Photonics are betting big on the opportunity.

Paul Gillin lays out the very public Snowflake-Databricks clash in detail in the definitive story of the latest battle of the AI era. Ironically, given all the heat AI is producing, it’s about Apache Iceberg, the management layer that sits atop data files in cloud storage.

Google shook up its management team, in particular in search and ads, as well as Gemini AI. It looks like DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis has finally consolidated his hold on all things AI at Google.

Down is up and up is down in the chip industry. In a hell-freezes-over moment, Intel and AMD decided to cooperate on standardizing the x86 chip instruction set. Meanwhile, TSMC and ASML issued widely different earnings results — chipmaker TSMC benefiting from roaring AI chip sales and equipment maker ASML suffering from a drop in sales to China and Samsung.

Next week’s events include UiPath Forward and Celonis’ Celosphere, and we’ll have news and interviews on theCUBE from both. The enterprise earnings season kicks off with IBM, Seagate and SAP, ahead of a much large number of reports the following two weeks from Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon and many others.

TheCUBE Research analysts John Furrier and Dave Vellante discuss this and other news in more detail on this week’s theCUBE Pod, out later today on YouTube. And don’t miss Vellante’s weekly deep dive, Breaking Analysis, arriving this weekend for some lean-back reading. Meantime, check out this past week’s installment, zeroing in on Microsoft’s much-debated Azure revenue and what it means for the overall cloud market.

Here’s all of this week’s top news, newsy topics and analysis from SiliconANGLE and beyond:

AI and data: Smaller, simpler, faster… and more contentious

Headline news and analysis

Big-data dust-up: Why two AI giants are at war over who is more open

Accel says generative AI startups get 40% of VC investment in cloud

Generative AI churns the waters at European NoCode Summit

New models and services

Mistral introduces Ministral 3B and 8B AI computing models for phones and laptops

AWS and Databricks to deliver more affordable generative AI for joint customers

LatticeFlow releases framework for checking LLMs’ compliance with the EU AI Act

Google looks to spearhead AI adoption in the public sector

DataStax merges its data stack with Nvidia’s development tools to simplify AI development and fine-tuning

Adobe introduces new generative AI features for its creative applications

Domino Data Lab seeks to embed governance in AI development

Cognizant enhances Neuro AI platform for faster AI use case deployment

OutSystems integrates generative AI with low-code to accelerate and simplify app development

Big data startup UltiHash unveils advanced deduplication to boost AI storage efficiency

Money matters

Terray Therapeutics rakes in $120M for AI-powered small molecule drug development

AI startups Decagon and Neuron7 raise millions to transform customer service and repairs

AI observability firm Galileo raises $45M to improve AI model accuracy

Omnea raises $25M to streamline procurement with AI

French AI startup Gladia raises $16M and launches multilingual real-time transcription engine

Data science and AI development platform Zerve raises $7.6M

Simplismart raises $7M to help enterprises run their own AI models with rapid inference and full control

Amplitude buys Command AI to help companies integrate AI-assisted onboarding and product tours into software

There’s more AI and big data news on SiliconANGLE

Around the enterprise: Big Tech goes nuclear

Completing the cloud nuclear trifecta after Microsoft last month announced it will tap into a reopened Three Mile Island: Google to buy nuclear energy from small modular reactor startup Kairos Power and Amazon to invest in three nuclear energy projects But these are all going to take years to produce energy, so it’s not going to solve the data center energy crunch anytime soon.

AI explodes the data center

At the Open Compute Project Global Summit in San Jose, which focuses on new technologies and standards for data centers, the talk was all about how AI is changing everything in the data center, and creating new problems to solve:

* Does it seem hot in here?: If there’s one thing everyone’s freaking out about, it’s heat — specifically the heat generated by servers full of chips from Nvidia and other AI accelerator chipmakers. There were dozens of companies offering liquid-cooling solutions, considerably more than last year if I remember correctly. “You can no longer air-cool these servers,” said Saurabh Dighe, corporate VP for Microsoft Azure strategic planning and architecture. They need to be liquid-cooled.”

* But AI chips aren’t the only source of heat. Copper wire works fine in individual data center racks, but with AI forcing more racks to be connected to tackle training of huge AI models, optical interconnects are becoming more and more critical — and those interconnects currently also take a lot of power and produce a lot of heat. “We need to get the power down,” said Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder and chief architect of Arista Networks. “We cannot change the laws of physics, but we can come up with better connectors.” That’s something established companies and startups such as Lightspeed are working hard to do.

* Sustainability was the other, closely related byword at the summit. One standard being mulled is how to use “all that warm water from [cooling] data centers for more than just letting it evaporate in the air,” said Supermicro VP of Solutions Thomas Garvens.

* But the problem with standards is that they take a lot of meetings and back-and-forth to establish. “Standards can take more time than we have in the era of AI,” said Google Principal Engineer Amber Huffman.

* By the way, if it weren’t apparent already, networking looks to be the biggest bottleneck in the AI era. “The networking is essentially becoming the computer,” said Sameh Boujelgene of market researcher Dell’Oro Group.

* ”Pigs can fly”: AMD EVP Forrest Norrod used that phrase to describe a deal between AMD and Intel to create an x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group, which although not an OCP project was revealed onstage at the summit by Norrod and Intel EVP Justin Hotard. If Intel weren’t in such a hole, this never would have happened, given the decades of legal and market battles between the two. But if either of them wants to challenge Arm, whose designs are now powering data center chips for cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services, Google and Microsoft, they need an instruction set as unified as Arm’s to ensure software compatibility among Intel and AMD chips and keep developers on the x86 train. Our story: Intel and AMD team up to improve the x86 processor architecture

There was lots of other news, honestly a lot of pretty arcane stuff, but no surprise that Nvidia, whose CEO Jensen Huang insists all data centers must become “AI factories,” captured so much attention: Nvidia aims to boost Blackwell GPUs by donating platform design to the Open Compute Project

And this startup is betting big on one ginormous factory: Crusoe’s $3.4B joint venture to build AI data center campus with up to 100,000 GPUs

Money matters

Breaking Analysis: What Microsoft’s financial disclosures reveal about Azure’s market position And it may force other big companies to reveal more about their AI revenue.

Private equity is bottom-fishing for software-as-a-service companies, which are increasingly being pressured by generative AI — not just because of investor interest but because chatbots have the potential to replace a good chunk of SaaS: Permira completes its $7.2B acquisition of Squarespace and Zuora to be acquired by Silverlake and GIC in $1.7B cash deal

Lightmatter raises $400M at $4.4B valuation for next-gen photonic data center networking

Xscape Photonics raises $44M to accelerate development of laser-based chip interconnects

ASML shares plunge on lowered 2025 revenue forecast

TSMC shares jump on expectation-topping third-quarter results

Dialpad expands workforce management capabilities with Surfboard acquisition

Developer tooling startup Port sails away with $35M in funding

Everstage raises $30M to enhance sales performance management platform

Lidar chip startup Lidwave closes $10M investment

Clerk Chat raises $7M to simplify business text messaging

VMware settles securities fraud class suit with $102.5M payout (per The Register)

New services

Salesforce launches customized financial services cloud platform for insurers

HashiCorp debuts new Terraform Stacks and Vault updates at HashiConf 2024

Tableau Software updates data visualization and cloud analytics management

SUSE enhances edge computing with new releases focused on scalability and efficiency

Cato Networks expands SASE Cloud Platform with new Digital Experience Monitoring service

Presidio expands AWS partnership to drive AI adoption and cloud migration

We have more news on cloud, infrastructure and apps

Cyber beat: Securing enterprise Android

New services

Google enhances security and management for corporate-owned Android devices

Akamai introduces Behavioral DDoS Engine and AI Assistance to strengthen security portfolio

Bitdefender’s new AI copilot works in real time to protect consumers from online scams

Lookout adds ‘smishing’ and executive impersonation protection to mobile security platform

Nametag launches ‘Deepfake Defense’ and expands Okta partnership to combat AI impersonation

OneSpan introduces VISION FX for phishing-resistant banking security

Tenable brings intelligent data and AI resource security risk management to the cloud

Money matters

Cyera acquires Trail Security for $162M to expand AI-powered data security platform

DeNexus expands cyber risk management platform with $17.5M investment

More cybersecurity news here

Elsewhere in tech: Kindle gets color

Amazon refreshes its Kindle e-reader lineup with four new devices

FTC makes canceling subscriptions less of a pain with ‘click to cancel’ rule

Google files for emergency stay against Epic lawsuit it lost

Sam Altman’s Worldcoin rebrands as World and launches updated iris-scanning Orb

Stripe reportedly in talks to acquire fintech startup Bridge for $1B

Blockstream raises $210M to boost bitcoin blockchain layer 2 scaling technology

Path Robotics secures $100M Series D funding for its AI-enabled robotic welding technology

IoT startup Monogoto raises $27M to accelerate its global expansion

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

Comings and goings: Google’s management shakeup

Google reshuffles product leadership team and two AI units DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis gets the rest of Gemini, cementing his hold on all things AI at Google and elevating him to perhaps the No. 2 exec under Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai.

Meta announces layoffs across several divisions for abusing meal credits

Sebastien Bubeck, Microsoft’s vice president of generative AI research, is leaving the company to join ChatGPT maker OpenAI, though it’s not clear what role he will assume (per Reuters).

Former Palantir CISO Dane Stuckey also joins OpenAI to lead security (per TechCrunch)

What’s next

Events

Oct. 22-23: UiPath Forward, Las Vegas: TheCUBE will be there.

Oct. 23-24: Celonis’ Celosphere, Munich: TheCUBE will be there.

Earnings

A couple of big enterprise reports to kick off the third-quarter earnings season:

Monday, Oct. 21: SAP

Tuesday, Oct. 22: Seagate

Wednesday, Oct. 23: IBM

Photos: Robert Hof/SiliconANGLE