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 20% in after-hours trading Thursday, 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. But we also can’t forget that China remains a growing force in AI, as DeepSeek Friday debuted a new, competitive open-source model.
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.
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 — 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 below sums up all the news, followed by a few random thoughts:
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
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
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
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
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
Vast Data raises $1B at $30B valuation as AI infrastructure demand accelerates
Meta will adopt hundreds of thousands of AWS Graviton chips in latest AI infrastructure grab
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
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
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.
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
Featured photo: Google/livestream; others: Robert Hof/SiliconANGLE
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