As soon as online photo storage startup SmugMug Inc. heard about Amazon.com Inc.’s Simple Storage Service, an online data storage repository that debuted on March 14, 2006, “my eyes got all big,” co-founder and Chief Executive Don MacAskill said at the time.  Amazon’s S3, the pioneering service for what soon became known as cloud computing, ...

Massive AI startup funding raged on this week with a couple of billion-dollar-plus rounds for Yann Lecun’s and Mira Murati’s startups, plus multiple multi-hundred-million rounds for vertical startups and tool providers — I mean, look at the AI and Data Money Matters section down there, it’s nuts — plus big funding for data centers too. ...

Can telecommunications companies leverage artificial intelligence to become, at long last, more than dumb pipes? Or, as so often has happened, will they get left behind in the coming platform shift? Maybe third or 15th time’s the charm, and they certainly tried to make their case at this week’s MWC in Barcelona, with help from ...

After a few weeks in which Anthropic seemed to making huge strides, not least against its bigger rival OpenAI, it was hit this week by the Defense Department’s threat to force it to let it do anything it wants with its models or face losing a huge business with the feds. To his credit, Anthropic CEO ...

You know AI is still pretty frothy when a company with no product or even publicly stated plans for one gets a billion dollars from the likes of Sequoia and maybe Nvidia, Alphabet and Microsoft. But that’s what Ineffable Intelligence just did. Fei-Fei Li also just raised a billion dollars for her World Labs, though ...

Investors are still looking askance at both software-as-a-service and traditional companies that might get disintermediated by AI as well as the AI companies and cloud providers that are spending all that money, wondering if they’ll get the return they’re hoping for. But not to worry too much: Dave Vellante and John Furrier each dug into how ...

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 ...

AI dealmaking hit overdrive this week, and it looks like it could stay in high gear for a long time to come. For one, there’s Elon’s potential megacorp, which surely will have X somewhere in the name — maybe three Xs! By various reports, he’s looking at combining xAI, which owns X, the former Twitter, ...

In the first big initial public offering of 2026, the crypto platform BitGo shot out of the gate fast as initial trading jumped 25% over the offering price. Investors took a deep breath later, but the stock still rose almost 3% on the day — which means it raised about as much as it could. ...

Google parent company Alphabet hit the $4 trillion mark this week, second only to Nvidia in market capitalization, and no wonder. It kept showing off its newfound AI prowess, as Apple will use Gemini in the background for Siri, and Google released a new personalization tool for Gemini as well as a new protocol for ...