Constellation Research analyst Chirag Mehta outlines India's strategy for AI and building an ecosystem. "This strategy is clear: make India a base for global compute, deepen the build ecosystem behind it, and let the partner economy scale on top. The question is not intent. The question is execution," said Mehta.
Enterprise software vendors are bonkers for forward deployed engineers as the model to deliver value. Palantir, which pioneered the FDE model, is on the AI version. On Palantir's earnings call, CTO Shyam Sankar said Palantir's AI FDE is developing well. Palantir has created an AI agent FDE. "AI FDE continues to delight. AI FDE is now capable of powering complex SAP ERP migrations from ECC to S/4, years of work now done in as little as 2 weeks. And we are generalizing AI FDE's capabilities to do this for a broader and broader set of problems at our customers," said Sankar.
SpaceX acquires xAI in move aimed at accelerating space-base AI data centers. We assume the negotiation went well between Elon Musk and himself. Elon Musk said in a SpaceX post that the goal of the xAI merger is to "form the most ambitious, vertically-integrated innovation engine on (and off) Earth, with AI, rockets, space-based internet, direct-to-mobile device communications and the world’s foremost real-time information and free speech platform."
OpenText said it will sell Vertica to Rocket Software for $150 million in cash to reduce debt. OpenText said it is selling off non-core assets to improve its balance sheet and focus its efforts. Vertica contributed $80 million in annual revenue to OpenText. In January, OpenText sold its eDocs business to NetDocuments Software for $163 million.
Anthropic released a paper on disempowerment usage in AI by analyzing Claude conversations.
The paper examines beliefs, values and actions in a dataset of 1.5 million Claude.ai conversations. Disempowerment, where a user's autonomous judgment is fundamentally compromised, occurs in roughly 1 in 1,000 to 1 in 10,000 conversations. Although that's rare, there's a large number of people affected. If you were to lump in all usage across models, the number of humans affected swells. here's what disempowerment looks like in practice.
Ninety percent of private equity firms and 80% of corporations see mergers and acquisitions picking up in 2026, according to Deloitte.
Bain found in a survey of 1,000 global executives and employees that 88% of leaders are confident that their reorganizations will work. Only 36% of employees agree. Just a data nugget to keep in mind amid the layoff announcements.
Here are a few interesting reads from this weekend.
Nvidia’s $100 billion investment into OpenAI is reportedly on the rocks. The Wall Street Journal reported that Nvidia is questioning the investment internally. Reuters reported that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang thinks OpenAI is undisciplined. A few points to ponder:
First, the investment announcement made it clear the deal was non-binding, but OpenAI would give Nvidia’s infrastructure preference. The report may simply give Nvidia more leverage. Here's the original announcement.
Since that initial announcement with Nvidia, OpenAI cut deals with AMD and Broadcom. Perhaps that diversification strategy miffed Nvidia. Who knows?
As for cloud providers, OpenAI has also said it will work the hyperscalers and may use custom silicon too to follow a diversification strategy more like Anthropic.
Wall Street is trading SaaS stocks like LLMs are putting them out of business tomorrow--or close to it. These year-to-date returns as of Jan. 30 would be bad for a full year. It's been one month.
YTD returns for selected enterprise software giants so far.
You get the idea.
HCLSoftware argued in its Tech Trends 2026 report that CxOs will prioritize AI agents and autonomous systems at the expense of SaaS. The report, based on 8 months of insights from 173 enterprise leaders, found that 84% of respondents expect low-code/no-code AI apps to hit full scale in 18 months. This Service-as-Software approach will disrupt traditional SaaS. HCLSoftware's PDF download is worth the read. This SaaS meltdown is a topic I'll be exploring in the days and weeks ahead.
Western Digital and Sandisk used to be merged. They're doing just fine separated. Sandisk reported second quarter revenue of $3.03 billion, up 31% from a year ago, with net income of $803 million, or $5.15 a share. Sandisk raised its third quarter revenue outlook to $4.4 billion to $4.8 billion.
As for Western Digital, second quarter revenue was up 25% to $3.02 billon with net income of $1.8 billion, or $4.73 a share. And the business continues to strengthen with revenue of about $3.2 billion. Seagate also reported strong results. It's a storage boom thanks to AI.
