Cloudy weather, except for AI: All of this week's enterprise and emerging tech news you need to know

Cloud computing may be seeing some clearing, but it’s still rather overcast as enterprises continue to try to save money. Meantime, cybersecurity companies are cooling, and so are their stocks. But generative AI remains red-hot and so are the companies managing all the data that powers it.

Here’s all you need to know about what happened this week from stories in SiliconANGLE and beyond, with commentary to make sense of it all, or at least to indulge in some snark.

You can also watch SiliconANGLE’s John Furrier and Dave Vellante offer their unique spins on this and other news in their weekly podcast theCUBE Pod. The latest episode is out now, available here.

And for some lean-back weekend reading, don’t miss Vellante’s Breaking Analysis, his weekly deep dive into enterprise topics, new installment available here. This one is for tech investors, with Ivana Delevska, founder and chief investment officer of Spear Invest, addressing where to invest beyond tech’s Magnificent Seven stocks.

X’d out

X is going after an anti-hate speech organization over ‘baseless’ claims Just one thing say: Suing a group because it said something you disagree with is rather the opposite of “Protecting the public’s right to free expression.” Meanwhile, X can’t even use its new sign. And now it’s actually allowing people to hide their blue checkmarks, which seems to underscore how far the service has fallen. But most of us haven’t left yet, so the saga will continue….

Cloudy weather continues, and not just in cloud

Amazon/AWS: Amazon delivers surprisingly good earnings results as AWS cloud growth starts to stabilize Cloud growth keeps slowing, to 12%, its lowest growth rate ever. AWS did beat the Street’s estimates by 10%, and overall profits are up more than expected, lifting the stock after-hours. Andy Jassy (pictured) tried to temper expectations by noting in an interview: “Every company in the world is trying to save as much money as they can.” But he and CFO Brian Olsavsky seemed to suggest that things should improve by the end of the year, which may be what sent the stock up more than 8% Friday. Meantime, the cloud slowdown was more apparent in Digital Ocean‘s earnings. Revenue rose 27% in the quarter, but that was a disappointment, knocking the stock down 22% after-hours, so that cloud spending slowdown is clearly affecting smaller businesses as well.

Apple: As far as pricey phones and computers are concerned, consumers still in the doldrums, and though Apple’s stock is still up 50% on the year even after Friday’s nearly 5% decline, it doesn’t yet have an AI story to boost shares even more. Thanks god for apps, since services saved the quarter from being even worse:Apple revenue falls and it expects decline to continue in the current quarter

Chips: A mixed bag: AMD makes ‘strong progress’ on AI chips and its stock rises Maybe so, but it cited slow cloud sales, which seems a little odd given that AI startups are all but selling their first-born kids for GPUs. Lisa Su promises AI demand will make up for that by the end of the year, though. And there’s tough times for Qualcomm too: Qualcomm‘s stock falls on light guidance as it warns of further job cuts

Cyber roundup: Investors were not too happy with all the uncertainty, even for some that beat. Fortinet missed only a little but stock crashes 17% and hits other cyber stocks. Cloudflare beat, stock up 6% after-hours, but it’s broader than cyber. SolarWinds beat and its stock jumped:Mixed bag in cybersecurity as Cloudflare, Fortinet and SolarWinds report quarterly earnings Earlier this week: Commvault shares fall despite earnings and revenue beats

Fintech fizzle: PayPal and Robinhood shares slide despite earnings and revenue beats and Block and Coinbase shares fall despite earnings and revenue beats

More earnings in enterprise and beyond

Shares of Arista Networks jump 14% on strong earnings and revenue beat

Informatica beats the Street and touts AI’s potential upside to its business

Uber shares fall on mixed second-quarter earnings Finally, an operating profit. Only a couple of decades of similar profits left to make up for its cumulative losses! 

Western Digital posts surprise earnings beat despite mounting losses

Freshworks grows its revenue, cuts its losses, and its stock rises sharply

Strong earnings and revenue beat send Dropbox‘s stock higher

Atlassian shares skyrocket on strong earnings and revenue beats

Cloud growth helps Appian beat expectations, but profitability concerns weigh on stock

Enterprise software provider OpenText reports strong results in latest quarter

Another big week for big data

Analyst George George’s takeout on an emerging new computing platform category: What is a data platform? TL;DR: The new development tool for building enterprise applications.

And analyst Rob Strechay’s take on What is a data product? Spoiler: A key ingredient for creating data apps, the future of software.

Vast Data essentially comes up with a new data structure for AI: Vast Data announces global data infrastructure layer for AI workloads

And all that data needs to go somewhere, hopefully in someone else’s building: Data center builder Stack Infrastructure raises another $250M in debt financing and Equinix reports strong earnings amid growing demand for digital infrastructure

Cybersecurity beat

John Chambers’ latest shot… at Cisco: Enterprise network-as-a-service startup Nile raises $175 million, pushing the notion of zero-trust networks.

Good if scary survey from BleepingComputer of generative AI-driven chatbot attack programs: Cybercriminals train AI chatbots for phishing, malware attacks

But many companies are looking to use the same tools to fight back, but it’s clearly a game of catch-up, as we said at Supercloud 3: Solvo introduces SecurityGenie, a prompt-based cloud security solution and Torq Socrates agent leverages AI for comprehensive threat analysis and Jericho Security secures $3M to counter AI-powered phishing attacks

Speaking of AI

… which every CEO did to excess in their earnings calls this week…

OK, this is a really big bet on generative AI, not to mention a pretty awesome pivot, and whether it works or not, investors clearly believe all those Nvidia GPUs it has, and obviously the many more it’s looking to buy, are pretty good collateral these days: CoreWeave raises $2.3 billion debt financing to fund its cloud AI training infrastructure. And it’s not alone: Data centers are going to be spending big to catch the AI opportunity.

In the AI Gold Rush, it’s no surprise that generative pickaxes and shovels are a big opportunity in the short term: Datadog announces LLM observability tools and its first generative AI assistant

And there’s a lot more to come: AI investment forecast to approach $200 billion globally by 2025

Better than advice from Donald Trump: Want advice from Abraham Lincoln? Meet Meta’s new multi-persona AI chatbots

Making everyone a musician? Meta releases AudioCraft, a generative AI model for creating music and sound

And everyone a game character creator: Inworld AI raises fresh funding for AI character engine at $500M valuation

Elsewhere around the enterprise

Just in Friday: Google Search Antitrust Suit Narrowed by Federal Judge Ahead of September Trial

Maybe the IPO window is opening just a bit: Arm could reportedly go public in September at $60B+ valuation

Protectionism accelerating: India moves to restrict PC and server imports, though the country delayed the rules a month on Friday.

Our cybersecurity writer David Strom digs into the prospects for smart shopping carts. The upshot: like self-checkout, not that great: Smarter shopping carts are coming but usability and privacy concerns loom

Strom also examines the controversy over Google’s latest cookie replacement attempt: Google’s Web Environment Integrity project raises a lot of concerns

A brief history of why online payments options continue to multiply amid the ups and downs of e-commerce: What’s behind the never-ending rise of online payment technologies

Yes, events are hard, made harder by trying to turn them into a venture-backed business, unlike some of us: RingCentral acquires Hopin’s flagship virtual event platform

Enterprise moves

What is it about observability that seems to require private equity to fix? Francisco Partners (which already owns Sumo Logic) and TPG to buy New Relic in $6.5 billion deal

Rohit Prasad to lead generative AI team at Amazon — and he’s now on Jassy’s exalted S-Team.

Dell co-COO Chuck Whitten to leave the company next month Seemed inevitable since Jeff Clarke wasn’t going anywhere. Unshaved guys in t-shirts FTW.

Cloudera appoints software industry veteran Charles Sansbury as CEO 🥱

EnterpriseDB appointed Microsoft and Wind River vet Kevin Dallas its new CEO.

Photo: Robert Hof/SiliconANGLE