Artificial intelligence bubble or boom, there’s no company riding it better than Nvidia, whose earnings report this week managed to outpace sky-high forecasts thanks to its providing the most popular chips in the known universe.

AI also dominated the announcements and conversations at a raft of industry events this past week, from Dell Technologies World and IBM Think to Microsoft Build and Informatica World — and we had the news from them all, along with a lot of analysis.

If it all seems a little excessive, of course it is — there’s more than a little AI washing here — but it’s also clear that just about everything in the entire tech stack is getting reengineered with AI. So there’s some method to investors’ madness, even as they plow what seems like crazy amounts into Elon Musk’s xAI, Scale AI and even some companies you may not have heard of, such as H and DeepL. For all that, a few are falling behind — Stability AI most famously but Snowflake axed talks to buy Reka and Humane, maker of the AI Pin, is looking for a buyer.

Meanwhile, AI transparency and safety remain a work in progress, as OpenAI’s GPT4o steps in it with its Scarlett Johansson soundalike and Google new AI Overviews returns crazy answers.

Not least, a Microsoft outage hit Bing, Copilot and other services, and lasted the better part of a day.

Next week, look for earnings reports from Dell, UiPath, Nutanix, HP, Salesforce, Okta, NetApp, MongoDB, HashiCorp, Marvell, Zscaler, SentinelOne, Elastic, Box, PagerDuty and Asana.

This and other news will be discussed in depth on John Furrier’s and Dave Vellante’s weekly podcast theCUBE Pod, out this afternoon on YouTube. Also, don’t miss Vellante’s weekly deep dive, Breaking Analysis, due out this weekend.

Here’s this week’s roundup of the most important tech stories from SiliconANGLE and beyond:

At every industry event, AI is the star

Microsoft Build

Microsoft beefs up Azure’s arsenal of generative AI development tools

Microsoft’s Copilot is becoming more of a team player

Microsoft simplifies Azure provisioning and debuts first VMs based on its custom silicon

At Build, Microsoft Fabric, PostgreSQL and Cosmos DB get AI enhancements

Microsoft brings developers AI tool updates across Visual Studio and Azure

And from its Copilot+ PC and Surface event Monday: Microsoft debuts Copilot+ PCs with range of AI and cybersecurity boosts Not everyone, however, is thrilled with one feature: Microsoft’s AI screenshot function is being called a privacy nightmare

Dell Technologies World

Dell expands AI-focused hardware line and tightens Nvidia alliance

CEO Michael Dell on leading the AI revolution: How Dell is future-proofing through AI

How Dell integrates compute, storage and networking for seamless hybrid AIOps: theCUBE analysis

Is Dell Technologies getting AI right? Live analysis from theCUBE

IBM Think

IBM pivots to focus on code generation with open-source Granite generative AI models

IBM CEO Arvind Krishna kicks off IBM Think 2024: Here are some highlights

Bigger is better: Running AI on the cloud appears to be winning strategy

Navigating AI complexity: IBM’s evolving ecosystem and the future of AI-as-a-service

AI analyst weighs in on IBM’s evolving role in artificial intelligence

A ‘glue layer’? IBM’s possible key role amid shifting landscape

IBM opens up to new collaborations in effort to stay ahead in the AI race: theCUBE analysis

Informatica World

Informatica will infuse generative AI throughout its products

CEO Amit Walia positions Informatica to get customer data ready for generative AI

Streamlining data management: TheCUBE’s Day 2 keynote analysis at Informatica World

The big bucks keep coming (though a couple of firms lose out)

AI training data provider Scale AI closes $1B round at $13.8B valuation

Report: Elon Musk’s generative AI startup xAI to close on $6B funding round next month

DeepL raises $300M at $2B valuation to help enterprise businesses with AI language solutions

H, a new Paris-based AI startup, raises $220M from prominent investors

Generative AI music maker startup Suno raises $125M in funding

Hydrolix raises $35M to expand streaming data lake operations and partner network

WitnessAI unveils AI safety platform after securing $27.5M in venture capital

Patronus AI reels in $17M for its AI model reliability testing platform

AI contract review platform Superlegal raises $5M to help companies close deals quicker

Australian startup SpatialAI raises $3.4M to advance AI in architecture and construction

Never mind: Snowflake talks to acquire Reka AI reportedly fizzle with no deal

Report: AI wearable maker Humane seeking sale at up to $1B valuation

AI transparency and safety remain a work in progress:

C’mon Sam: OpenAI moves to pull ChatGPT ‘Sky’ voice after users say it sounds too much like Scarlett Johansson OK, so OpenAI didn’t specifically ask for a ScarJo clone, but… c’mon.

AIOops: Google Search’s new AI Overviews feature tells users to put glue on pizza, create mustard gas This just goes to show that generative AI shouldn’t be expected to do more than its current architecture actually allows (and maybe, some say, never will be able to achieve). But can’t the AI be trained to just look up the right answers that actually exist out there — like a search engine does?

Stanford HAI says generative AI model transparency is improving, but there’s a long way to go

Anthropic manages a peek inside the black box of large language models

EU greenlights AI Act as tech giants commit to responsible model development

Amid growing deepfake fears, FCC chair wants more transparency around AI-generated political ads

And more AI and data news

Howie Xu launches new tech show as AI landscape continues to evolve

Amazon reportedly preparing paid Alexa version powered by its own Titan AI model

OpenAI strikes deal with News Corp. to access Wall Street Journal content

Seemed obvious despite all the doomsayers claiming AI Overviews would put them out of business that there would be new ad formats coming: Google Search’s AI Overviews will soon get ads But advertisers may be wary of putting their ads next to potentially weird answers

Google Cloud Consulting launches Generative AI Ops to assist in enterprise AI deployments

Cohere open-sources Aya 23 series of multilingual LLMs

Pinecone launches serverless edition of its vector database on AWS

Enterprise DB begins rolling AI features into PostgreSQL

Lasso Security brings contextual data protection to generative AI applications

Around the enterprise

Earnings

Whew. Nvidia was insane, of course — a company growing revenue 260% at $26 billion for the quarter. The big question is: How long can that continue? Of course the rate has to slow — right? — but few people are envisioning a significant cooling anytime soon. Sure, the Blackwell chip isn’t out until later this year, but there’s no evidence of Osborning here. Oh, it split its stock 10 to 1.

Nvidia delivers another crushing earnings beat, with data center chip sales rising 427%

Snowflake ups its revenue forecast and buys AI observability firm TruEra, sending its stock higher

Palo Alto Networks posts strong earnings, but stock dips on disappointing forecast

Workday’s stock drops on mixed financial results and lower guidance

Zoom delivers earnings beat and lifts its full-year guidance, but investors are unimpressed

Mixed Q2 results for Synopsys: Revenue falls short, adjusted EPS surpasses estimates

Strong fiscal earnings performance drives Zuora stock up nearly 10% after-hours

In other enterprise and cloud news

Global outages hit Microsoft Bing, DuckDuckGo, ChatGPT Search and Copilot 

Financial software maker AuditBoard to be acquired by Hg Capital for $3B+

Nutanix goes all-in on Kubernetes, bids for VMware defectors

Lots of money going into the data centers to run all those AI models:

Amazon Web Services to invest $17B in data centers in Spain

Google details plans for new subsea internet cable linking Africa and Australia

Google to invest €1B in Finland data center expansion

That must be a lot of TPUs: TechInsights: Google was third biggest data center processor supplier last year (from CRN)

Cloud cost optimization startup Finout reels in $26.3M in Series B funding

ZeroPoint raises $5.5M for its on-chip data compression technology

JetBrains officially releases Kotlin 2.0 in major update to programming language

PagerDuty Operations Cloud gets a boost with new AI and automation capabilities

Cyber consolidation continues

CyberArk acquires cybersecurity provider Venafi for $1.54B

Bugcrowd expands security services with acquisition of Informer

OpenText acquires Pillr MDR platform from Novacoast

In other cyber news

Averlon launches advanced AI cybersecurity platform after securing $8M in funding

SaaS authentication platform startup Userfront launches with $5.3M in seed funding

HoundDog.ai raises $3.1M to help companies proactively prevent sensitive data leaks

Nightfall AI introduces ‘Firewall for AI’ to enhance security in generative AI applications

Generative AI services have driven a huge surge in phishing attacks

Immersive Labs warns generative AI bots are highly vulnerable to prompt injection attacks

Scale Ventures highlights widening resource gaps and funding challenges in cybersecurity

Elsewhere in tech

Oh please, NYT — these folks were never for Biden, and some never even claimed to be. This should surprise no one: It’s always about the money. If it were really about making the world better as they so often claim, not a single one would vote for Trump, let alone give him money. Some of Silicon Valley’s Most Prominent Investors Are Turning Against Biden

BlackRock, Fidelity and six other firms receive SEC approval for Ethereum ETFs

Google invests $350M in Indian e-commerce giant Flipkart

Farcaster secures $150M to expand decentralized social networking features

Aerodome raises $21.5M to send drones to assist first responders on calls

TikTok reports disruption of influence campaigns to limit state propaganda

Comings and goings

Samsung Electronics replaced Kyung Kye-hyun, co-CEO and head of its chip business, after the memory chip maker lagged rivals such as SK Hynix in the current AI boom. Jun Young-hyun will take over for Kyung, who will remain at Samsung in a different role.

Kevin Mandia, CEO of Google’s Mandiant unit, will step down at the end of May. 

EVP Sandra Joyce and VP Jurgen Kutscher will take over duties at Mandiant, which Google bought from the founder in 2022. He will remain an adviser.

AI phenom Anthropic hired Airbnb CFO Krishna Rao as its first CFO.

Sophos named Joe Levy CEO and Jim Dildine CFO.

Gordon Bell, who created minicomputers for Digital Equipment Corp. in the 1960s and remained active in computer architecture for decades more, died May 17 at age 89.

DRAM inventor Robert Dennard died April 23 at age 91. The longtime IBM engineer also created a concept, complementary to Moore’s Law, called Dennard scaling, which says that as transistors get smaller, their power density stays constant, so power use stays in proportion with area.

What’s next

A Memorial Day holiday week pause in events, but plenty of earnings reports:

Tuesday, May 28: Box

Wednesday, May 29: UiPath, Nutanix, HP, Salesforce, Okta and C3.ai

Thursday, May 30: Dell, NetApp, MongoDB, HashiCorp, Marvell, Zscaler, SentinelOne, Elastic, PagerDuty and Asana

Image: SiliconANGLE/Microsoft Designer