At Cloud Next this week in Las Vegas, Google made its case this week that it has all the pieces — literally the entire “stack” of technologies from chips to models to data management platforms — needed to provide essentially the operating system for AI agents, the autonomous software that is the only thing that seems to matter in tech today.

Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian (pictured) may not have the panache of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, but he made up for it in clarity. “We are firmly in the agentic AI era,” he declared, adding what that means: “Every employee in every organization can be a builder.”

SiliconANGLE has all the news and analysis from the very crowded conference for 32,000 people, theCUBE has lots of interviews from the show floor.

Intel laid down another argument that it’s on the comeback with a solid quarter that sent its stock up almost 24% Friday, though it’s still got a long way to go and a lot of challenges along that way. Texas Instruments also rose, by 19%, thanks to AI data center demand for its analog chips, and SAP rose a bit on a quarter buoyed by healthy AI business. AI optimism is back, it seems.

But not universally. IBM also had a good quarter but not good enough especially on the AI front, and its stock fell almost 21% on the news. ServiceNow also fell on a muted outlook because of the Iran war’s impact on some big deals, a reminder that tech at times still lives in the real world.

OpenAI struck back with a new model that leapfrogged Anthropic just a week after Anthropic appeared to leapfrog OpenAI. Rest assured, this will continue since they both seem to have more money than God, Anthropic having just gotten up to a $25 billion commitment from Amazon this week — and, on Friday, an additional commitment from Google of up to $40 billion.

But we also can’t forget that China remains a growing force in AI, as DeepSeek Friday debuted a new, almost-competitive open-source model. Not to mention maybe Europe and Canada, with Friday’s announced merger of Cohere and Aleph Alpha.

Bye bye Tim, hello John: Apple’s new CEO John Ternus is a hardware guy. Can he come up with the fundamentally new product that eluded Tim Cook? We’ll find out… maybe in a few years.

How important is really fast and efficient data management in storage in the agentic age? Investors answered by giving Vast Data a billion dollars at a soaring $30 billion pre-IPO valuation.

Meta’s big layoff arrived, and Microsoft implemented its first voluntary employee buyout, apparently mostly for old people. How much this is AI replacing people or growing AI funding replacing salary costs is still unclear. For Meta, at least, probably the latter: On Friday, it inked a multibillion-dollar AI infrastructure deal with Amazon Web Services. Then again, it’s really pushing AI on employees, so maybe it’s both.

That didn’t take long: Some people got unauthorized access to Mythos, Anthropic’s so-good-it’s-scary-and-you-can’t-have-it-yet model. Cybersecurity experts are worried the bad guys might use it to launch attacks before the good guys can patch them.

Next week’s earnings include all the cloud heavy hitters — Alphabet, Microsoft and Amazon, and it should be entertaining to see how all this AI spending is shaking out on the balance sheet — as well as Apple, Meta, Samsung, Qualcomm and more.

Here’s all the enterprise and emerging tech news and analysis this week from SiliconANGLE, theCUBE, theCUBE Research and beyond:

AI and data: Google’s agentic blitz

Coverage from Google Cloud Next

Our extensive coverage and analysis below sums up all the news, followed by a few random thoughts:

Google’s AI agent platform takes pole position but work remains

Maximizing Gemini: Google Cloud makes its bid to build the operating system for enterprise AI

From GPUs to AI factories: Inside the Nvidia-Google Cloud superstack

Geopolitical pressures and AI initiatives drive enterprise adoption of a sovereign-first cloud strategy

Analysis from theCUBE Research’s Dave Vellante: From answers to actions: Why Google’s full-stack AI bet is gaining momentum – and what still needs to happen – reflections from an AMA with Thomas Kurian

The decisive layer in AI is still unclaimed: theCUBE’s Google Cloud Next day one keynote analysis

With Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, Google brings agentic development and control under one roof

Google puts Gemini Enterprise at the heart of the new agentic taskforce for enterprise automation

Two new TPUs to power the next wave of AI training and inference at Google

Google announces innovations in mega-scale networking for the agentic era  

With Workspace Intelligence, Google’s productivity suite gets more AI smarts

Google delivers connective tissue for autonomous AI agents to access data without restrictions

Google launches AI research agents powered by Gemini 3.1 Pro

Lots of partnerships:

Salesforce and Google partner on agentic cross-platform collaboration

Google Cloud inks AI infrastructure deal with Thinking Machines

Oracle expands Google Cloud partnership with natural language database agent

Atlassian expands Google Cloud partnership with deeper Rovo and Gemini integrations

Groundcover adds agentic AI tracing to observability platform, backs Google Vertex AI

And lots of security news:

Google rolls out new Security Operations agents, Wiz integrations and agent governance tools

CrowdStrike brings real-time Cloud Detection and Response to Google Cloud

Rubrik rolls out Cloud SQL cyber resilience and Gemini agent governance at Google Cloud Next

Commvault brings its full suite of data backup and resilience capabilities to Google Cloud

Exabeam extends Agent Behavior Analytics to Google Cloud’s agent ecosystem

Contrast Security integrates ADR with Google Security Operations for runtime app visibility in the SOC

These previews held up really well:

As AI powers Google, what’s next for Google Cloud

Google Cloud Next 2026 preview: The real story isn’t AI — it’s the control plane

A few random thoughts from interviews, keynotes and other presentations, and walking the expo floor, with more to come later when I can transcribe my recorded interviews and sort out, as we like to say, the signal from the noise:

* Agents may not put software-as-a-service applications out of business anytime soon, but it sure looks like they could quickly become a new and perhaps primary way we get work done, pushing SaaS apps into a supporting role. Much more than that, the agents will be talking to each other in response to what work we want to get done, meaning the user interfaces and other visible artifacts of apps are likely to be superfluous. “The primary user will be an agent,” Andi Gutmans, VP and GM of Google’s Data Cloud, told me in an interview. Nobody’s yet sure what software will look like then, but Gutmans said one thing’s clear: “We’re going from human-scale to agent-scale,” and that’s going to require an entirely different data platform.

* That soon will make us less individual contributors, he said, than an “orchestrator of agents,” where “everyone is becoming a manager,” which doesn’t necessarily sound too fun. But tech progress always involves higher and higher levels of abstraction, and we always have had plenty of work despite that, so I suspect we’ll muddle our way through to finding fulfilling work to do. Or maybe it will leave us more time to paint or take hikes or doomscroll more.

* Bottlenecks in the tech stack have always shifted over the years, but it seems like these days, everything is a bottleneck to doing AI better, from insufficient power to not enough compute. Right now networking is a particular obstacle to the kind of instant communications agents require, from connections between chips to connections among far-flung data centers. Google and every other cloud provider are furiously optimizing all this, with the aim, as Rob Enns, Google’s VP and GM of cloud networking, put it to me, to make those networks as invisible as possible to both enterprises and end users. “We want to take the friction out of running all these agents,” he said.

* Mark Lohmeyer, Google Cloud’s VP and GM of AI and computing infrastructure, noted at a press chat that agents appear to require 20 to 50 times the number of tokens, or units of data, as chatbots. “*It’s putting tremendous pressure on the infrastructure with a whole new set of demands,” he said. “A single intent can kick off a chain reaction. This requires a fundamentally new kind of infrastructure” — which was what Google talked about all week. 

* Agents could be the mother of all lock-ins, especially since Google, AWS and Microsoft are all pitching the full- or nearly-full-stack approach. Once an enterprise decides on one provider, it’s going to be pretty hard to change, at least in the next few years. One small example: Workplace Intelligence, the new service that automates information gathering among Google Workplace apps, looks useful even if you’re just using, say, Gmail and Google Drive, which have a lot of data specific to what you do. But if your company is all-in on, say, Microsoft Outlook, you’re SOL. That’s not necessarily Google’s fault — Microsoft needs to provide a way to make Outlook data accessible to Google — but how likely is that to happen?

* At his keynote, Kurian seemed to admit tacitly that Google had to catch up on the AI it helped pioneer. “We are more on the front foot than ever before,” he said, adding: “We are moving in a bold and responsible way.”

More to come, especially with another flurry of conferences coming soon, a couple of data and AI conferences from Snowflake and Databricks and also Microsoft Build, all in June.

New models and services

OpenAI releases GPT-5.5 with advanced math, coding capabilities

DeepSeek open-sources V4 large language model series

Experian takes consumer financial guidance to the next level with AI-powered virtual assistant

AWS accelerates AI agent development in Amazon Bedrock AgentCore

Snowflake targets ‘agentic enterprise’ with unified control plane for AI and data

Moonshot AI releases Kimi-K2.6 model with 1T parameters, attention optimizations

Adobe deploys AI agents across its customer experience tools

Five takeaways from CEO Shantanu Narayen’s final keynote at Adobe Summit

OpenAI subscribers get new ‘workspace agents’ to automate complex tasks across teams

Intercom’s customer service agent takes on new sales role

Iterable launches Nova agent to assist markets in scaling customer personalization

Yutori launches Delegate to turn AI agents into proactive web workers 

Amplitude introduces contextual AI assistant to guide users

Grafana is trying to close the AI observability gap before enterprise agents reign supreme

AppZen targets accounts payable bottleneck with new AI agent service center

Yelp launches new Assistant chatbot integrated into every part of the platform

Portal26 launches Agentic Token Controls to cap runaway AI agent spend

Money matters

Amazon to invest up to $25B in Anthropic as part of expanded cloud partnership And not to be left out, Google Friday committed up to $40 billion to Anthropic.

Vast Data raises $1B at $30B valuation as AI infrastructure demand accelerates

Cognition, creator of the AI software engineer Devin, in talks to raise ‘hundreds of millions’ at $25B valuation

Omni raises $120M round backed by GV for its AI analytics platform

SpaceX partners with Cursor on AI training, floats potential $60B acquisition

Cyera acquires Ryft to give enterprises traceable data access for AI agents

Treehub launches with Tim Draper and Anne Wojcicki to back the next wave of AI health founders

AI research lab NeoCognition lands $40M seed to build agents that learn like humans

Syenta raises $26M in funding to speed up chip interconnect production

Octen raises $10M in seed funding to speed up AI agent search queries

Policy

Florida attorney general issues subpoenas in ChatGPT probe over FSU shooting

Around the enterprise: Intel ascendant?

Earnings and other money matters

Intel crushes Wall Street’s expectations and its stock surges 20% as revival gains pace

IBM blows past estimates, but declines to raise full-year forecast, tanking the stock

SAP posts solid earnings results to shrug off latest software stock slaughter

ServiceNow’s stock skids as Middle East conflict drags on revenue

Texas Instruments’ stock jumps 19% for best day since 2000 as AI demand soars

SK Hynix posts record first-quarter profit, in line with estimates as memory prices climb

Tesla misses on revenue but beats on profit as auto margins jump

Pegasystems Q1 earnings miss estimates, revenue declines

Why Wasabi opted for credit in its latest financing round

Software artifact management startup Cloudsmith raises $72M

New products and services

The DP World Tour tees off a new era of connectivity by tapping Amazon Leo

Braze launches agentic AI tools and Creative Studio, adds EU hosting for Decisioning Studio

Policy

Kalshi suspends three congressional candidates for making bets on their own elections

US special forces soldier charged for making insider bet on Maduro’s removal

Cyber beat: The Mythos mess

Attack & response

Mythos remains a mystery as security world faces rising threats, agentic attacks and concerns about AI integrity

Anthropic investigates unauthorized access to restricted Claude Mythos AI model

Developer tooling provider Vercel discloses breach that exposed some users’ data

New services

DeepKeep rolls out Vibe AI Red Teaming to test AI apps and agents

Zero Networks launches AI Segmentation to govern autonomous AI agents

CrowdStrike launches Project QuiltWorks coalition to tackle AI-discovered vulnerabilities

Ivanti extends Neurons platform with autonomous IT and security capabilities

Aikido Security debuts Endpoint for AI-native developer security

Mondoo debuts free AI Skills Check to flag risky agent skills before installation

Cowbell debuts Prime One cyber insurance with AI and quantum risk cover

Money matters

Rilian raises $17.5M to automate security software procurement and deployment in the defense sector

Copperhelm dives deep into automation to build enterprise cloud defenses 

Elsewhere in tech: Cisco leaps into quantum

Cisco unveils universal switch for the quantum networking era

Reliable Robotics announces $160M in new investment

Pudu Robotics raises nearly $150M at $1.5B valuation to deploy embodied AI technology 

Comings and goings: Apple’s new CEO

Tim Cook out, John Ternus in: Apple named hardware boss its next chief executive.

Meta will cut 10% of staff, cancels 6,000 open roles in AI efficiency push.

Microsoft plans its first-ever voluntary employee buyout for up to 7% of its U.S. workforce.

Microsoft’s LinkedIn named longtime exec Dan Shapero its new CEO.

Amazon added AWS infrastructure chief Prasad Kalyanaraman to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy’s “S-team” of top leaders and also promoted cloud computing and AI services leader Dave Brown to SVP (per GeekWire).

Joe Beda has joined Stacklok as chief technology officer, rejoining fellow Kubernetes creator and CEO and Heptio co-founder Craig McLuckie.

New AI lab Core Automation ‘nerdsniped’ researchers from Anthropic, Google DeepMind (per Business Insider).

What’s next

Events

April 27-29: Appian World, Orlando. TheCUBE will be there for interviews and analysis.

* Sponsored event

Earnings

Monday, April 27: Cadence

Tuesday, April 28: Commvault, NXP, Robinhood, F5, Seagate

Wednesday, April 29: Extreme Networks, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta Platforms, Samsung, Qualcomm, Equinix, Tenable, Check Point Software

Thursday, April 30: Apple, Twilio, Atlassian, Western Digital, Sandisk, Five9, Rivian

Featured photo: Google/livestream; others: Robert Hof/SiliconANGLE