Results

Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu penned his shareholder letter and had a bunch to say about AI. Here's a look:

"We expect the addressable market for companies like Alibaba that provide full-stack AI capabilities is poised to grow exponentially. Against this backdrop, Alibaba's AI has moved beyond the initial investment phase and entered full-scale commercialization."

Alibaba's cloud external revenue growth was 40% in its latest quarter.

"At the infrastructure layer, our proprietary T-Head AI chips have achieved production at scale, delivering high-performance compute capacity to our cloud infrastructure and Model-as-a-Service (MaaS) inference platform."

And then there's Qwen.

"In foundation models, we continued to accelerate our research and development pace, releasing three updates to the Qwen family within the past three months. Our latest generation large language model, Qwen3.7-Max, is specifically engineered for agents and expands the frontier of model capabilities, including in core competencies such as agentic coding and complex reasoning. Complementing the Qwen family, we achieved advancements in specialized models such as HappyOyster, a real-time interactive generative world model, and HappyHorse, a multimodal model for cross-modal understanding and generation."

Here's a look at Qwen 3.7 Max.

Alibaba AI efforts

Salesforce announced a bevy of Informatica updates and integrated the data platform more with its core properties. Here’s what’s available, planned and launching in 2026.

  • Headless Data Management and Headless CLAIRE — Generally Available, Spring 2026
  • Agentic Integration — Q4 2026
  • Data Quality Agent — Generally Available, Spring 2026
  • Metadata Enrichment Agent — Q4 2026
  • Agentic Multidomain MDM and Data Steward Agent — Q4 2026
  • Data 360 Connector and Scanner — Generally Available, Spring 2026
  • MDM Integration with Data 360 — Q3 2026
  • CLAIRE in Slack — In Preview Now — Q4 2026
  • Agent Fabric Context Catalog — Generally Available, Spring 2026

OpenAI is likely to file for its IPO soon as it scurries to the public markets to ride along with Anthropic, says the Wall Street Journal. I can't wait to see these numbers.

The Journal said in its story in a rather understated way.

OpenAI will have to overcome a host of other challenges, namely concerns about whether the company will be able to generate enough revenue to support its giant data-center spending commitments.

Ya think?

Aveva, an industrial software company, and IFS, which focuses on enterprise software for verticals such as manufacturing, inked a deal to integrate systems to better track assets and data. The companies said the joint effort will focus on combining operational and asset data to speed up decisions. Use cases will revolve around maintenance, capital planning and risk management. The partnership is the latest indicator that operational technology and IT are converging.

Blackstone launched a joint venture with Google to offer TPUs as a service. The venture is focused on building TPU-optimized AI data centers and giving customers another option to access. The joint venture starts with a $5 billion investment to bring 500MW of capacity online in 2027.

From a statement:

"The company expects to bring the first 500 MW of capacity online in 2027, with plans to scale significantly over time. Google will supply hardware, including TPUs, as well as software and services to the new company so it can rapidly accelerate to meet the growing demand for accelerated computing, leveraging the benefit of Google’s technical and domain expertise."

Here's an interesting read from Salesforce Ben on how the Salesforce ecosystem is struggling with frequent shifts:

"For a long time, the platform was relatively easy to understand at a high level. Sales Cloud was for sales teams, Service Cloud was for support, and so on. Even as the ecosystem expanded, the messaging was largely tied to business functions and real-world outcomes. Today, it doesn’t feel that straightforward.

Instead of clearly defined clouds or use cases, the conversation has moved heavily toward Agentforce, AI, AI infrastructure, and now, the “headless” experience. Also, these products are being positioned less as standalone solutions and more as part of a broader AI ecosystem. This isn’t necessarily the wrong shift to make, but it is a very different way of communicating value in Salesforce."

I doubt that this is a Salesforce-specific issue. All of SaaS is struggling to keep up.

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.

NextEra 1

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

NextEra 2

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

NextEra 3

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.