This week, it was all Elon, all the time.

Let’s see: Musk offers to buy OpenAI (translation: gums up the works for Sam Altman’s attempt to turn OpenAI for-profit, since OpenAI’s board Friday rejected the offer). Makes Trump look like a babysitter for Musk’s four-year-old son prop at a press conference. Tries to cement his government coup via DOGE as judges remind him and Trump we’re (supposed to be) a democracy. Creates a cybersecurity nightmare in the process. Gets a $400 million federal bailout for his failed Cybertruck (for a few seconds).

Did I miss anything?

It’s now “Do whatever you want” with AI, for better or worse, at least in the U.S., as Biden’s AI rules got nixed and the U.S. refused to sign an international agreement on safe and inclusive AI. Meantime, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman pledges more openness (we’ll see), and news organizations get more aggressive on copyright in a lawsuit against Cohere and note continuing problems with hallucinations.

Paul Gillin dug into how venture capitalists view the AI investment environment post-DeepSeek, and guess what? It actually looks way more promising than some doomsayers suggested.

AI chips are getting very hot. As OpenAI steamrolls ahead on new models, it’s also close to making AI chip in-house. And Arm is now reportedly looking at designing chips to sell itself, with Meta Platforms the likely first customer. Meanwhile, Intel stock rose more than 20% this week after U.S. pushed TSMC to operate its factories, but it’s far from a done deal.

Hardware’s not dead, as HPE, Cisco and Juniper release new gear. Dell also could sell $5 billion worth of AI servers to Musk’s xAI. Oh, and Meta reportedly is about to go deep into robotics.

Another big earnings week: Cisco, Supermicro, Confluent, Coinbase and Robinhood beat. Informatica sure didn’t, and its stock fell by a third. Palo Alto Networks fell on a disappointing outlook too. Overall it was a mixed bag — full results below.

More cyber consolidation is coming, with Trend Micro on the block and CyberArk acquiring Zilla.

You can hear more about this and other news on John Furrier’s and Dave Vellante’s weekly podcast theCUBE Pod, out later today on YouTube. And don’t miss Dave’s weekly deep dive, Breaking Analysis, out early next week.

Here’s all the news we could fit from SiliconANGLE and beyond, in another busy week:

AI and data: OpenAI, meet Musk’s monkeywrench

Headline news and analysis

Venture investors see DeepSeek accelerating AI market growth

Consortium led by Elon Musk makes $97.4B offer for OpenAI Late-breaking Friday: OpenAI’s board rejects the bid

Sam Altman pledges more openness as OpenAI works toward AGI

Paris AI Summit: US, UK refuse to sign agreement on ‘safe’ and ‘inclusive’ AI as JD Vance sends warning

Report says companies ‘playing with fire’ as AI chatbots fail when trying to summarize news

Major publishers launch copyright lawsuit against AI startup Cohere

At Developer Week, Mark Albertson dug into how intense interest in AI agents is colliding with AI security concerns: Building AI with AI: Developers scramble to keep pace with new applications as security concerns grow

Money matters

France announces €109B investment plan to boost AI ecosystem

DataRobot buys Aqnostiq to advance AI agent development with dynamic compute orchestration

Meta considers acquisition of Korean AI chip startup FuriosaAI (per Forbes)

Tines nabs $125M for its AI-powered workflow automation platform

Harrison.ai raises $112M for its AI medical diagnosis tools

Legal AI startup Eudia launches with $105M to bring AI agents to legal teams

Sardine raises $70M to expand AI risk platform

Latent Labs raises $50M to develop new proteins with AI

SpotDraft raises $54M to help legal teams manage contracts with AI

Integrail raises $10M in seed funding for no-code agentic AI delivery platform

New models and services

OpenAI to launch GPT-5 in a matter of months, GPT-4.5 within weeks

Workday unveils AI agent workforce management system

Snowflake partners with Anthropic to release its first AI agents

Baidu to open-source its Ernie large language model series

Glean Technologies jumps into no-code agentic AI development with Agentworks

Adobe launches commercially safe AI video model for creative professionals

Amplitude integrates in-app surveys into its behavioral analysis platform

F5 targets AI-era IT challenges with ADC 3.0 reference architectures

Zilliz enhances AI cloud offering with enhanced ‘Bring Your Own Cloud’ capabilities

Enterprise-sized implementations, bite-sized AI agents at ZohoDay25

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

Around the enterprise: AI will keep driving the cloud higher

Headline news and analysis

Breaking Analysis: Investors cool on cloud but CEOs double down

Report: Arm to build its own chips, and Meta is first in line to buy them

Intel stock rose more than 20% this week after U.S. pushes TSMC to operate its factories, but it’s far from a done deal.

Money matters

Report: Dell close to inking $5B+ AI server deal with xAI

Harness and Traceable announce merger to bring API security to AI-driven software delivery

NXP buys Kinara for $307M to power AI workloads at the network edge

EnCharge raises $100M to accelerate the rollout of its energy-efficient edge AI chips

Moderne raises $30M to solve technical debt across complex codebases (per TechCrunch)

Cloud storage optimization startup Lucidity raises $21M

Kodiak Hub AI-powered supplier management platform raises $6M to expand into the US

Earnings: ups and downs

Cisco delivers solid earnings and revenue beat, boosting its stock And Zeus Kerravala’s takeaways: Five thoughts from Cisco’s second-quarter earnings

Supermicro forecasts crazy revenue growth for fiscal 2026, boosting its stock

Coinbase obliterates projections as crypto trading surge drives 172% increase in transaction revenue

Informatica plunges 33% on revenue miss, citing ‘internal issues,’ but says underlying business is strong

Shares of Teradata sink on missed revenue and soft guidance

GlobalFoundries shares rise following mixed earnings results

China’s SMIC Q4 profit slumps 38%, misses estimates despite revenue growth

Applied Materials warns of revenue hit from new Chinese chip export restrictions

Confluent’s cloud growth engines keep on firing, sending its stock higher

Shares of Fastly fall hard and fast on earnings miss and weak guidance

Robinhood shares jump 16% as company smashes estimates with 700% crypto trading growth

JFrog is firing on all cylinders as it delivers another impressive earnings beat

Twilio reports modest revenue growth but disappoints on guidance

Freshworks reports strong quarter with 22% revenue growth and earnings beat

HubSpot shares fall as guidance disappoints despite earnings beat

Despite turning profitable, Lyft sees shares drop 10% on earnings miss and weak outlook

Pegasystems posts better-than-expected sales but stock falls

Cyber wrap: Palo Alto Networks, Datadog and CyberArk report strong results, mixed outlooks

Rapid7 shares drop on mixed fourth-quarter results and weak outlook

Solarwinds earns $12.6M profit on 6% rise in revenue, to $200M, as Turn/River Capital acquisition awaits

New products and services

OpenAI reportedly finalizing design for in-house AI chip ahead of TSMC fabrication

HPE rolls out ProLiant servers optimized for AI and security-sensitive workloads

Cisco embeds security services in new line of programmable switches

Juniper Networks expands wired access portfolio with AI-native EX4000 Series switches

Harness expands experimentation and feature management for DevOps teams

SAP announces Databricks partnership to power AI with Business Data Cloud

Cerebras powers Perplexity Sonar with industry’s fastest AI inference

We have more news on cloud, infrastructure and apps

Cyber beat: The DOGE cyberattack

Attack & response

Cybersecurity experts raise concerns over DOGE’s access to federal systems

AI aggregator OmniGPT reportedly breached, leaking sensitive user data online

New phishing campaign exploits immigration arrival card process to steal personal data

Money matters

Private equity firms reportedly competing to buy cybersecurity provider Trend Micro

CyberArk acquires user access management provider Zilla for $175M

Andesite AI raises $23M as it brings its bionic Security Operations Center to market

New services

Nvidia reveals how its AI platform enhances real-time cyberthreat detection

Kandji expands Apple security offerings with Vulnerability Management

More cybersecurity news here

Elsewhere in tech: The Muskovite coup continues

Report: DOGE staffers ‘effectively shut down’ CFPB

Trump appoints VP JD Vance to oversee TikTok negotiations as US ownership talks intensify Late-breaking Friday: TikTok returns to US app stores following ban suspension

Meta plans major investment into AI-powered humanoid robots (per Bloomberg)

​​AI-powered humanoid robotics company Apptronik raises $350M

Archer Aviation raises $300M from Blackrock to expand defense sector focus

QuEra Computing raises $235M to accelerate error-corrected quantum computing

Lyft reportedly plans to deploy Mobileye-powered robotaxis by 2026

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

Comings and goings

Nokia named Intel data center and AI head Justin Hotard its new CEO.

Docker announced Don Johnson as new CEO, succeeding Scott Johnston.

Gary Steele is resigning as of April 25 as Cisco’s president of go-to-market of less than a year, after serving as CEO of now Cisco-owned Splunk. (per CRN)

Hayete Gallot, a veteran Microsoft executive and current corporate vice president of its commercial solutions, will become Google Cloud’s president of customer experience April 1.

Druva appointed former VMware finance BP Jagroop its new chief financial officer.

Former Medallia VP Adam Block is new chief revenue officer at Motive, which calls itself the “AI platform for physical operations.”

Sophos shed 6% of staff after swallowing Secureworks (per The Register)

What’s next

Earnings:

Tuesday, Feb. 18: Arista

Wednesday, Feb. 19: Appian, Amplitude

Thursday, Feb. 20: Akamai, Dropbox, Five9, RingCentral, Rivian, Block

Photo: Tim Reckmann/Flickr CC