Politics hits data centers, OpenAI falls behind Anthropic and now AI is too big to fail… quietly

Data centers, of all things, now look like they’re going to be a prime political issue in the midterm elections and beyond. Really?

Really. Even the GOP is worried that opposition to AI data centers could give Democrats a potent campaign issue. It seems a little odd given that data centers are decades old, power our iPhones and the whole internet, and no one raised issues so vociferously before. Sure, there’s a whole lot more of them being built and more proposed, and yes, they have environmental issues and they don’t employ many people, but on the face of it, big buildings seem like an odd nexus of left and right opposition that goes beyond those issues.

And it does. To my mind, the data center backlash really about what they’re for: AI. For all the undeniable benefits, AI is getting shoved down people’s throats by big tech companies, many of which are eager to tell people how many jobs it’s going to eliminate. Stopping data centers won’t really stop AI, but it could be the pin to the AI bubble.

Meanwhile, it’s apparent that big tech is spending a lot more than it looks, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis — $3 trillion more thanks to off-balance-sheet commitments. Moreover, those making the AI chips need money themselves to build for all that demand, such as Broadcom,  reportedly aiming to raise as much as $100 billion in debt financing and AI data center builder Nscale eyes a $3 billion IPO. All this raises concerns anew about whether profits will ever come. In any case, the stakes and risk keep rising, to the extent that the AI buildout, says Dave Vellante, is now too big to fail… quietly, at least.

Seemingly a heartbeat after everyone declared it was unstoppable, OpenAI is apparently slowing down, at least for now — trailing Anthropic, which reportedly could file for its initial public offering of stock as early as the end of August, possibly beating SpaceX’s record IPO.

Payment processor Stripe acquired the AI model routing company OpenRouter this week for about $7.5 billion, and what makes it worth that much? As Andreessen Horowitz’s Martin Casado put it: “Together, they become the trusted, scaled, and performant network where the world’s AI companies exchange intelligence.” Or as Alex Heath put it even more succinctly: “Stripe wants to meter intelligence.”

Cybersecurity firms are scrambling to get ready for AI agents, and they’re snapping up startups to make sure, as Fortinet bought Virtue AI and Cribl acquired technology assets from AI security operations startup Radiant Security.

Earnings next week will be headlined by Nvidia, providing an indication of the state of the AI infrastructure buildout, along with Marvell, Nutanix and Everpure. We’ll also get a sense of how AI may be having an impact, for good or ill or both, on software-as-a-service and cybersecurity companies such as Salesforce, Workday and CrowdStrike, among others.

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

Analysis, opinion and food for thought: The AI high-wire act

ICYMI: Breaking Analysis: Did Nvidia’s Jensen Huang just make the AI buildout too big to fail? And there’s discussion (and disagreement) on the AI bubble on the latest theCUBE Pod with Dave Vellante and John Furrier.

Why Big Tech’s AI spending is $3T higher than it seems (per the Wall Street Journal). Knocked stocks down a little Tuesday. Not hard to see why investors are wary.

One answer ultimately will be more efficient models on the way, starting with these: These startups are chasing the next big thing in LLMs (per MIT Technology Review)

GOP urges top AI firms to do something about the toxic image of data centers

AI was supposed to win people over by now — it hasn’t (per TechCrunch, but I can attest that many people in their 20s, and older, are not thrilled with a technology that has been promised to vaporize their jobs. I know a lot of PR people whose jobs are threatened by AI who may be available to help change minds out there! But this is more than a PR problem).

Still, AI isn’t yet net killing a lot of jobs, though where it’s spurring new employment may be shifting: New York unseats San Francisco as the top market for tech talent, CBRE reports However, it always seems like a warning sign when finance drives tech job growth.

AI and data: OpenAI falters… for now

Money matters

Report: Anthropic hopes to surpass SpaceX’s record IPO raise when it finally floats

OpenAI falls further behind Anthropic, with disappointing revenue growth and mounting losses

Stripe buys AI model router OpenRouter in reported $7.5B deal

Higgsfield raises $400M at $5.4 billion valuation to scale video and image generation platform

AI cloud operator Groq raises $350M more in funding

Wispr raises $280M to power up natural speech-to-text using AI

AI workload optimization startup Callosum raises $100M

Accounting AI startup Rillet raises $100M to reach unicorn status

Sanja Fidler’s world model startup Veeda AI raises $90M in seed funding

Rundoo raises $30M to expand its AI-native operating system for small supply stores

Twin1 AI raises $20M to put an AI twin behind every knowledge worker

Astromech raises $20M to build a biological operating system that can forecast evolutionary change

Palona raises $20M in funding to bring AI automation to brick-and-mortar businesses

Google pays $10M to get its hands on Spirit Airlines’ business data for AI training But: Google’s attempt to buy Spirit Airlines’ data might come unstuck

Exclusive: Synthefy raises $6.5M for its number-crunching models trained on numerical data instead of words

Hypercubic raises $5.3M to map out and rewrite legacy COBOL apps with AI agents

New models and services

Cybersecurity concerns prompt OpenAI to pause some AI training runs

OpenAI’s junior version of ChatGPT with guardrails has launched

DeepSeek debuts multimodal language model competitive with Opus 4.8

Cursor launches Origin code hosting service to compete with GitHub

Salesforce expands Headless Data 360 for MCP so developers can bring insights to agents

Salesforce introduces Slack Code to bring agentic team coding into the open

Adobe expands generative AI audio with Firefly music, speech and sound effects

Google partners with the aviation industry to prevent climate-warming contrails with AI

Cloudera Anywhere Cloud gives AI agents safe, secure access to sensitive data wherever it lives

Firefox updates Smart Window a new in-browser AI assistant that can keep up with you

SuperApp launches a shared space with AI models for teams to collaborate on work

Adronite launches Codistry AI coding platform, claims half the token cost

NLPatent rebrands as Clerq, launches agentic patent research workflows

Hexaware bundles its AI services under a Zero Friction Enterprise framework

Ciklum partners with ClickHouse to speed enterprise migrations to real-time analytics

Around the enterprise: The next big AI IPO

Money matters

AI data center builder Nscale reportedly seeking $3B IPO

Broadcom reportedly seeking up to $100B in debt financing for AI chip deal

Marvell shares jump 9.8% on Google chip design deal

OpenAI leases 8.2-gigawatt AI data center campus from SoftBank’s SB Energy

Inference chip startup Etched nabs $700M more at $21B valuation

Fractile reportedly eyes $6.5B valuation with $600M round after Anthropic chip deal as UK AI challenger takes aim at Nvidia

Application reliability startup Temporal reportedly in talks for $500M funding round

Starcloud raises $250M to build AI data centers in orbit

Velaura AI raises $110M to develop power-efficient AI chips

Alibaba shares fall 5% as AI spending drives 75% drop in net income

SK Hynix is buying back $28.6B of its own stock to boost shareholder returns

Relativity Networks raises $22M to bring a faster kind of fiber to data centers

Healthcare software firm Weave Communications to go private after being acquired by Francisco Partners

Thunder Compute raises $13M to squeeze more work out of idle GPUs

New products and services

Waymo details the custom chip in its autonomous driving system

Graphwise wants to become the semantic layer for AI agents after securing major investment from Oakley Capital

Cerebras unveils CS-4, up to 30X faster than GPU-based solutions

Cloud cost startup North adds Microsoft Azure to complete hyperscaler support

Cyber beat: AI drives cyber consolidation

Money matters