Oh, Jensen… really?
Honeypot or not, the Chinese executive/accused spy with whom Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang admitted an affair this week should have been a flashing red light to him. So should fraternizing with one of your own VPs — and reportedly another employee too!
In the end, all that, and maybe more to come, was just too much for Nvidia’s board to bear despite the commanding position Huang (pictured) held not only at Nvidia but in the entire artificial intelligence industry. Indeed, the speed with which he resigned — spectacularly stupid as his behavior was — still makes me wonder if there are other shoes to drop, especially on the legal or national security fronts. Market researcher SemiAnalysis thinks it came down to pressure from the U.S. intelligence community that’s very unhappy Nvidia chips have apparently been smuggled to China.
Huang was something of an AI puppet master, providing the chips and software to power the entire industry as well as seemingly unlimited cash to fund and backstop everyone from AI leaders such as OpenAI and Anthropic to innumerable cloud compute providers worldwide. No single person inside or outside Nvidia seems likely to fill that role — and maybe Nvidia and certainly the AI industry shouldn’t be depending on one person to keep everything afloat anyway.
However, Nvidia really is much more than Jensen Huang. Interim CEO and CFO Colette Kress helped craft the financial arrangements that in part put Nvidia at the center of AI — though Huang himself wasn’t a fan lately. Some of his direct reports such as high-performance computing chief Ian Buck seem quite capable of carrying on, if perhaps not with Huang’s panache. One company is never one person, and shouldn’t be. I expect a less centralized Nvidia going forward, whoever’s at the top.
The reverberations of his sudden and shocking departure will continue to echo for a long time to come across Nvidia, its investors watching hundreds of billions of market cap evaporate, legions of Jensen fanboys and the entire artificial intelligence ecosystem. A lot of people are hoping desperately that he didn’t just pop the AI bubble. It seems unlikely this will be the pin, but we’re dealing with a lot of unlikely things in the past week or so, for better and worse, and this shock is clearly rattling the foundations.
All that managed to overshadow what otherwise would be the big news this week: Anthropic went on the road to pitch its initial public offering. It’s hoping to raise more than $64 billion and keep the AI trade humming in Nvidia’s near-term absence. Looks like next Thursday is the big day.
And it’s not the only good news in AI — that is, if the IPO is successful. After a difficult month on the stock front, uber neocloud CoreWeave provided a pleasant AI surprise with upside earnings and guidance, lifting its shares almost 25% Wednesday. AI chipmaker Cerebras’ shares rose almost 18% in late trading Thursday on positive guidance and a Microsoft deal. Cisco Systems said demand is strong for AI infrastructure, even if investors shrugged, and chipmaking equipment supplier Applied Materials said AI boosted demand as well.
Not everyone fared so well, though. Dutch neocloud Nebius saw its shares drop almost 17% Thursday as it lowered its outlook despite close to sevenfold revenue growth in the last quarter. The stock drop no doubt was partly because of Nvidia, which is, of course, an investor. CoreWeave –yes, another Nvidia investment — lost 7% Thursday.
The software orchestrator Kubernetes has become boring, but as SiliconANGLE’s John Furrier said at this week’s KubeCon in Salt Lake City, that means it’s a success — with lessons for AI developers. “A lot of things that are happening in cloud-native that were involved in microservices in Kubernetes world are actually the same challenges in the AI world,” he noted.
IBM has been working hard on quantum computing for a long time now, but at its Quantum Developer Conference in Chicago this week, it showed significant progress, according to theCUBE Research Chief Analyst Dave Vellante. Its goal now is to show actual industry impact by 2028, a laudable goal that presents a lot of challenges, Dave said in his Special Breaking Analysis this week.
Sovereignty is on many enterprise buyers’ lips these days, the notion that enterprises need a way to assert more control over their technology estates and protect their customers’ data. Dave and Amit Eyal Govrin just completed the first of many reports on how to approach sovereignty, this one focused on the hyperscale cloud providers.
Look later today here for a link to theCUBE Research’s and SiliconANGLE’s new sovereign cloud buyers guide, the first of a series for this increasingly important topic.
Next week the SC26 high-performance computing conference comes to Chicago, and theCUBE and theCUBE Research will be onsite with interviews and analysis. There’s also Microsoft Ignite in San Francisco. And earnings next week include… Nvidia! Bring the popcorn.
Here’s all of this week’s enterprise and emerging tech news, most of it not salacious, along with analysis and commentary from SiliconANGLE and beyond:
Analysis, opinion and food for thought
Breaking Analysis: Sovereign or not? The 2026 Hyperscaler Buyer’s Guide
Breaking Analysis: AI cyber resilience and the trust gap
Dario goes overboard with AI claims ahead of Anthropic’s IPO — the same guy who says AI could also extinguish us. Somebody give him back his Xanax! Also, I really don’t think mental illness is a compute problem.
Gartner forecasts AI infrastructure spending to represent 59% of total global AI spending in 2027
Gartner also forecasts AI will drive a net increase of 1.7M jobs by 2030 That one number hides a lot of job losses and especially job “transformations,” and not to throw shade on Gartner in particular, anyone betting on AI’s impact out in 2030 is barely more than guessing.
United Airlines is banning AI bots from booking flights, following Amazon and Walmart doing the same thing for shopping. Aren’t travel and shopping a prime use case for AI agents?
Getting too close to Trump was a mistake, says Nick Clegg. Amen. We’ve already seen them trying to backpedal, starting with Palantir CEO Alex Karp, who had the audacity to call his company “progressive.” Dude, sit down.
Zeus Kerravala sums upWhat we learned about the hyperscalers from earnings season
AI and data: The fall of Jensen Huang
Policy
The whole sad five-day saga that apparently was years in the making:
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang admits to having extramarital affair with suspected Chinese spy
Trump stands by Nvidia boss Jensen Huang despite spy scandal, but FBI is investigating
Nvidia’s board reportedly preparing to oust Jensen Huang after reports of a second affair
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang resigns following affairs scandal
SemiAnalysis has a good deeper dive on the implications going forward:Nvidia and the world without Jensen
Alice Huang: The spy narrative misses her real business, as a “white glove” commercial fixer Well, that’s an enlightening take, but it’s kind of moot now.
Money matters
Anthropic launches IPO roadshow with $64B fundraising goal
Mercor raises $750M at $20B valuation to take AI agent evaluation to enterprises
AI agent tooling provider LangChain secures $300M investment
OpenAI acquires Odessia, travel startup created by Sonder founder
Databento raises $100M at $1.1B valuation
Automation startup Rox raises $100M at $1.3 billion valuation
Edelbyte reels in $70M for its multipurpose data analytics platform
Graphon Labs raises $35M Series A to accelerate AGI with persistent intelligence
Lumbra gets $25M in backing to help intelligence community deploy reliable AI agents
Hatz AI raises $24M to help small businesses go AI-native through their MSPs
Plurai raises $13M to help AI agents work better using the same approach that helped get self-driving cars to roads
PuppyGraph raises $10M to let AI agents query enterprise data as a graph
Qvyon launches with $8M to improve safety for physical AI deployments
New models and services
Anthropic launches Fable 5.2 and Mythos 5.2 with science, coding upgrades
Meta introduces Muse Ember to power efficient AI subagents
Google releases Gemini 4 Hydrogen, a lower-cost model said to outscore Argon
Google DeepMind releases new advanced robotics AI model and next-generation gene prediction model
Google enters decision model market with Gemini Decisions API
Google tests Tabletop, letting groups build planning tools with an AI agent
Adobe expands AI assistant into creative workflows
Clipto enables ChatGPT and Claude to search and analyze years of people’s meetings and video calls
Exclusive: FormAssembly overhauls its platform to expand into AI-powered process automation
Kora builds AI models and agents into a new Linux OS bound for Qualcomm Snapdragon PCs
AWS aims to run agents securely and efficiently with next-generation AgentCore runtime
Policy and research
Cisco research: Trust, not technology, is now the speed limit on enterprise AI
Around the enterprise: AI can learn from Kubernetes
New products and services
Coverage from KubeCon North America:
Red Hat adds agentic AI operations, stronger security in OpenShift 5 and RHEL updates
Broadcom open-sources its Kubernetes VM manager
SUSE points Rancher Prime’s AI agents at virtual machines and updates its enterprise Linux
AI’s future starts to look surprisingly old-school: theCUBE’s KubeCon day one keynote analysis
And elsewhere:
Google advances agentic AI custom silicon expanding TPU family with 8tx and 8i Max
AMD introduces Epyc 6 processors for AI agent workloads
AMD brings Zen 6 architecture muscle to embedded systems with new EPYC 9006 series chips
Amazon’s open-source AWS Emulator lets developers validate their code locally, without the cloud
ServiceNow launches AI-powered engine to accelerate migrations from CRM rivals
Diagrid’s Dapr 1.19 lightens AI agent workflows and drops a control-plane service
Square takes Squaremates AI agent out of beta and opens up to sellers’ own AI software
PitchBook opens its platform to startups for free and debuts Origin deal sourcing service
Money matters
British inference chip developer Fractile raises $720M in funding
Hardware-testing and engineering startup Nominal raises $240M at $3B valuation
Dreeze launches with $33M to recover entire cloud applications, not just their data
With $23M in funding, Luminal is the latest startup to put Nvidia’s CUDA moat in its crosshairs
Staera launches with $4.6M to develop an optical interconnect for chiplets
AWS commits $100M in AI and cloud credits to health groups in underserved communities
Selected tech earnings:
Cisco beats expectations, lifts guidance and forecasts AI infrastructure revenue to double in fiscal 2027And Zeus Kerravala steps back for a broader perspective:Five thoughts from Cisco’s first quarter of fiscal 2027
Applied Materials posts impressive 53% jump in revenue as it beats expectations again
Surging AI chip revenue and Microsoft deal boost Cerebras Systems stock by 18%
CoreWeave arrests stock slide with strong earnings beat and higher guidance, lifting tech stocks
Shares of AI cloud operator Nebius drop 16%+ despite strong quarterly results
D-Wave Quantum earnings miss despite bookings boom
Rigetti stock slumps after Q3 results miss the mark
Cyber beat: Agents vs. agents, again
New services
Exclusive: Menlo IRIS extension gives security teams control over AI use without a new browser
Vanta launches AI Governance, Risk Quantification and a Vanta Agent for entire jobs
Commvault unveils Recovery Studio, AgentRecover update and joint work with three partners
Flashpoint launches threat investigation AI agents to automate security work
Teleport makes Beams generally available to bring AI agents into production
Cowbell unveils AI liability insurance for small businesses that deploy AI agents
Horizon3 launches Adversarial Intelligence Frontier Lab built on NodeZero attack data
Money matters
AI-driven managed security startup Daylight raises $80M on 40-fold revenue growth
AI security startup Bay launches with $50M to vet agent actions before they run
Cogent to acquire Specular to strengthen autonomous cyber defense against frontier AI threats
Elsewhere in tech: IBM’s quantum dreams
IBM Quantum announces upcoming Nighthawk r3 processor designed to execute 10,000 operations
Dave Vellante takes a deep dive into IBM’s quantum ambitions:Special Breaking Analysis: IBM Quantum and the race to make scientific advantage useful to industry
Quantum sensor and software maker Q-CTRL raises $290M in funding
Agile Robots raises $500M funding led by SoftBank at $8.5B valuation
Industrial automation startup Path Robotics raises $300M in funding
Alphabet’s Wing to invest $125M in new delivery drone factory
Oura to acquire AI-native primary care startup Counsel Health for $625M
Hedra’s new Model Factory cranks up the production volume for physical AI model training
Computer vision startup Tristar AI pulls in $12.4M to automate quality control for manufacturers
Comings and goings
HubSpotnamed co-founder Brian Halligan CEO, replacing Yamini Rangan, and said Chief Financial Officer Kate Bueker will retire in February.
Meta‘s head of infrastructure and co-head of engineering Santosh Janardhan is leaving. He will be succeeded by former Amazon Web Services SVP Dave Brown, who had joined Meta in July and will now lead infrastructure efforts and serve as chief technology officer of the Meta Compute initiative.
Trump nominatedPalantir security chief Michael LoSapio to lead the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency.
Mazhar Mohammed, a 33-year veteran executive at Microsoft, joinedAWS as new VP of AWS Streaming and Messaging.
Abnormal AInamed a new chief marketing officer to accelerate its expansion in AI security: Don Jeter, most recently CMO of Torq.
Charlotte Blank, former U.S. CMO at Jaguar Land Rover North America, joined Hive Science as CMO.
What’s next
Events
Nov. 15-20: SC28 high-performance computing conference, Chicago: TheCube and theCUBE Research will be onsite Nov. 17-19 with interviews and analysis.
Nov. 17-20: Microsoft Ignite, San Francisco: SiliconANGLE will be onsite with all the news.
Earnings
Tuesday, Nov. 17: Nvidia
Wednesday, Nov. 18: Palo Alto Networks, Pony AI
Thursday, Nov. 19: Elastic
Photo: Robert Hof/SiliconANGLE