Matt Wood is returning to AWS as Chief AI & Technology Officer. In a LinkedIn post, Wood said it was his first day back after a stint at PwC. Wood had been at AWS for 15 years before departing in October 2024.

NextEra Energy will acquire Dominion Energy in an all stock deal valued at nearly $67 billion. The combined company will be the largest utility with a footprint in Florida, the Carolinas and Virginia. This deal is mostly about AI data centers, which Dominion largely powers.

The funny part about this deal is I expected the deck to heavily note the AI data center opportunity. Instead, the companies danced around it.

Take this slide. Power consumption is surging. No mention of AI.

Or this one. Surely, the combined company will just be full of love.

At least in this slide, the companies at least mentioned data centers.

But you get the gist. Here's a combination of two energy companies that are clearly merging due to what's needed for AI data centers but doesn't want you to know that fact. This whole merger announcement highlights how the tide has turned and NIMBY is going to be a big challenge for building AI data centers.

Applied Materials reported strong fiscal second quarter results and it's not surprising given the company makes chip manufacturing equipment. Applied Materials benefits from the CPU, GPU and memory boom.

But it's worth noting comments by Applied Materials CEO Gary Dickerson on internal AI usage. He said:

"Over the past several months, global AI adoption has continued to accelerate as improvements in the performance and cost of AI computing are translating into real-world applications that deliver compelling returns for users. If I look at our own company as an example, today, we have more than 35,000 AI users across our global workforce. We are deploying AI to drive new scientific breakthroughs, accelerate research and development programs, optimize factory and supply chain operations, increase innovation and productivity and services and automate workflows across our corporate functions. This enables us to redirect resources towards higher value work and grow the business significantly faster than our headcount. Similar dynamics are playing out across a broad range of industries and organizations."

Akamai said it will acquire LayerX for $205 million in a move to add browser-based AI usage control to its platform.

A few life lessons from Venus Williams, who spoke at Boomi World 2026.

• "Nothing for me has ever made me really look at myself, except for failure--that loss or that failure where you have to sit down and say,' Hey, am I being honest? Am I doing things the right way?'"
• "A lot of times you take the safe route, or you try a little less so that you can stay in your comfort zone. But you never reach that apex, because you haven't taken the risks. Winning at a big level just takes risk. You gotta go for it. You gotta leave it all out there, because no one's giving it to you.”
• "If you're losing your will, it's either time for a change or time for new motivation."
• "I would always say, what decision would you make if you felt confident? What would you do? What would you start? Would you stay in that job? Would you dump that person?"

Cerebras Systems IPO highlights how Wall Street still loves AI chip plays. The company opened at $350, peaked at $385 and was priced at $185.

Here's the SEC filing.

The AI Security Institute published a blog on Anthropic's Claude Mythos Preview and GPT 5-5 and noted that the models are potent in vulnerability discovery, but the jury is out on other areas. Mythos is the first AI model to complete both of AI Security Institute's cyber ranges.

Anthropic launched Claude for Small Business and it's basically a wrapper for all the tools used by small businesses. The company said:

"Claude for Small Business is a toggle install that puts Claude to work inside the tools small business owners already use: Intuit Quickbooks, PayPal, HubSpot, Canva, Docusign, Google Workspace, and Microsoft 365. From these tools, it can plan payroll, close the month, run a sales campaign, chase invoices, and more."

Alibaba's fourth quarter earnings were disappointing, but the cloud unit continues to surge. The cloud intelligence group reported revenue growth of 40% with AI-related products accounting for 30% of revenue.

Eddie Wu, CEO of Alibaba, said in a statement:

"Our Qwen LLM demonstrated leadership in reasoning and coding while we strengthened our multimodal model portfolio with the launch of video generation and world models. As we see massive potential for agentic AI, we launched multiple enterprise AI agents for office and coding use cases, and we fully integrated e-commerce capabilities into the consumer-facing Qwen app, deepening synergies between AI and our consumer ecosystem."

Alibaba Cloud delivered fourth quarter revenue of $6.03 billion, up 38% and 40% with external customers only with operating profit of $550 million.

Softbank reported a big earnings jump in the fourth quarter, but all we really want to know is how much it made off its OpenAI investment. Here are the two money slides from its presentation.

Anduril raised $5 billion in a Series H round and now has a valuation of $61 billion. The defense contractor, founded in 2017, is looking to potentially IPO in 2027. Along with the funding announcement, Anduril published a shareholder letter. Some notable excerpts:

• "Advanced software allows even resource-constrained forces to control far more platforms than previously possible. Recent analysis suggests that improvements in autonomy will enable swarms far more powerful than any individual platform, with employment driven at costs once thought unimaginably low."
• "Advances in sensor technology allow militaries to detect activity across air, ground, and surface domains with unprecedented fidelity. Under such conditions, superior mass becomes decisive, and the rare domains where sensing remains difficult, like the deep sea, become disproportionately important."
• "Adversaries have more access to deep strike capability than ever. Inexpensive drones and missiles are reshaping how forces can hold assets under threat, with lines of contact extending far beyond visual range. Nations will need many well-dispersed and easily replicated effectors to respond."
• "The defense industry must shift from exquisite platforms toward intelligent mass—a mix of high-end and scalable systems that combine precision with producibility. We must embrace commercial manufacturing techniques, automation, and modern production methods that enable both quality and scale."

Google Cloud said it will be hiring more forward deployed engineers (FDEs) as part of its new AI Focused Organization. In a LinkedIn post, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian outlined the hiring plans.

• OpenAI launches OpenAI Deployment Company, acquires Tomoro
• LLM giants just love private equity partnerships
• Forward deployed engineers: The promise, peril in AI deployments