Anand Birje, former CEO of Encora, will become Hitachi's CEO of Digital Engineering & AI Solutions within the Digital Systems & Services sector. Birje stepped down from Encora in April. Encora was acquired by Coforge.
Birje previously held multiple executive roles at HCL Technologies.
Bloom Energy passed the $1 billion quarterly revenue mark for the first time. The company reported second quarter earnings of 62 cents a share on revenue of $1.06 billion, up 165% from a year ago. CEO KR Sridhar said:
"Today, all the major US hyperscalers and over a dozen US neoclouds, AI labs, and colocation data center operators have validated and approved our power solutions for their AI factories."
Snowflake launched Cortex AI Gateway, which aims to govern AI agents and control consumption costs. Cortex AI Gateway, which is built on the acquisition of Natoma, orchestrates and governs Snowflake native agents as well as third party ones.
Boomi said it has closed its Lunar.dev acquisition. The company said the plan is to provide an AI gateway to govern AI agents and manage connectivity between models and enterprise systems.
The deal was announced in May at Boomi World.
Neptune Insurance, which we covered when it went public, delivered a strong first quarter and highlighted what an AI-native company looks like. Some fun facts.
3M CEO William Brown said the company is using “AI-enabled tools that enhance planning, prioritize opportunities and accelerate productivity.” Specifically, Brown said on the company’s second quarter earnings call:
“Many of the activities and support functions like finance, HR and customer service operate independently across regions and business units, creating unnecessary complexity, inefficiency and duplication. We're bringing these activities together into a single global service delivery model and partnering with an external provider to run them at scale using automation and AI.”
Nvidia said it has invested in Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence Inc. As part of the partnership, Safe Superintelligence will get access to Nvidia's Vera Rubin systems and collaborate on next-gen capabilities.
Nvidia said it is launching the Open Secure AI Alliance to share tools that can better secure open weight models. The alliance launches with a bevy of key players, but there were a few notable omissions in AWS and Google.
AT&T will use D-Wave's quantum computing technology for network optimization use cases. According to D-Wave, AT&T used its quantum systems to reduce processing time for a network optimization workload from about an hour to less than 15 seconds. AT&T will now explore more use case for quantum.
Circle Internet Group said it has acquired IBM's blockchain portfolio, which has nearly 1,000 patents worldwide. The patents are focused on foundational blockchain technology, banking, financial services, enterprise infrastructure and cloud operations.
According to Circle, the blockchain patents will help it expand. Circle is best known for its USDC stablecoin, but has a much broader digital payment platform.
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Nvidia is providing a $250 billion backstop for OpenAI so it can lease a 10-gigawatt data center being developed by Softbank's energy subsidiary. The project could cost more than $500 billion including the chips, which will obviously be Nvidia's. The power is controlled by the US government and funded by Japan.
Now if we're keeping score at home, I count three backstops in a circular deal that winds up with more GPUs. Nothing to see here and I'm sure it'll be great, but circular financing critics are going to have a field day with this deal.
You don’t think of General Motors as a company that takes a hit on memory costs, but reality bites. GM CEO Mary Barra, who noted that GM partnerships with Micron Technology and Samsung, said on the company’s second quarter earnings call: “We continue to expect commodity inflation, logistics and higher DRAM costs to be a headwind of $1.5 billion to $2 billion for the full year. We realized approximately $600 million in commodity costs in the first half and expect that headwind to increase in the second half, largely because it reflects 2 quarters of higher costs rather than just 1. In addition, spot rates continued to rise after our first quarter earnings call. And while they have eased somewhat recently, several commodities remain above those levels.”
