CVS said it has decided to split up after years of trying to be an integrated health care provider. The company said it will split into two publicly traded entities. CVS Health will include Aetna, CVS Caremark, CVS Specialty, Oak Street Health and Signify Health. CVS Pharmacy will include its retail pharmacy and community healthcare operations as well as its Health100 technology services unit.

The split is expected in the first half of 2028. CVS Health CEO David Joyner argued that the split will accelerate the company’s strategy, but looks like a retreat in many respects. CVS, which also reported earnings, has attempted to create a healthcare data flywheel with mixed results, but appeared to be turning the corner.

• CVS Health outlines AI-driven ‘engagement as a service’ plan
• CVS Health’s Transformation Rides on Data, AI and Customer Experiences

Arista Networks' revenue growth in the third quarter was the best since its IPO. The company reported third quarter earnings of $1.22 a share on revenue of $3.66 billion, up 58.5% from a year ago. Non-GAAP earnings were $1.20 a share. Wall Street was expecting non-GAAP earnings of $1.08 a share.

The company projected fourth quarter revenue of $3.9 billion to $4 billion, well above the $3.57 billion estimate. Non-GAAP earnings will be $1.20 a share to $1.26 a share, well above the $1.15 a share estimate.

Jayshree Ullal, CEO of Arista, said:

"We are witnessing the migration from highly centralized training compute to disaggregated and distributed inference, prefill and decode, demanding much more intelligent networking and colocation of compute, storage and KV cache resources rather than simply focusing on raw feeds and speeds and flops of compute. A well-designed network is becoming a foundational cornerstone for optimal token efficiency."

Freshworks reported better-than-expected third quarter results as its strategy to target larger enterprises paid off. The company reported third quarter earnings of 7 cents a share on revenue of $245.4 million, up 14% from a year ago. Non-GAAP earnings were 22 cents a share, 4 cents ahead of estimates.

The company projected fourth quarter revenue of $253.5 million to $254.5 million, up 14% from a year ago. Non-GAAP earnings will be about 21 cents a share. For 2026, Freshworks projected revenue of $965 million to $966 million with non-GAAP earnings of 71 cents a share.

• Freshworks strong Q2 highlights power of focus

Dynatrace reported second quarter earnings of 23 cents a share on revenue of $580 million, up 17% from a year ago. Non-GAAP earnings were 54 cents a share. The company said its platform consumption was up more than 20%.

The second quarter non-GAAP earnings were 5 cents a share ahead of estimates.

Dynatrace also updated its outlook for fiscal 2027 and projected non-GAAP earnings of $1.88 a share to $1.90 a share with revenue of $2.33 billion to $2.34 billion.

Oracle said it has priced its $20 billion offering of stock and bonds designed to fund its AI infrastructure buildout. The offering of more than 86 billion shares were priced at $116. A series of notes with maturities ranging from 2028 to 2046 have interest rates between 7% and 8.65%.

The company's investor day featured an extensive walkthrough on how it is funding AI infrastructure. Wall Street analyst sentiment was generally positive. Here are the three models Oracle is working with.

OpenAI said it will hire Dan Driscoll, former US Army Secretary, to advise the company on national and cyber security efforts. Driscoll will be Senior Counselor for National Security Modernization. OpenAI said:

"In this newly created role, Dan will work with OpenAI teams and leaders across governments, industry, academia, and allied institutions to advance practical modernization initiatives that support the buildout of democratic AI. He will also help internal OpenAI teams understand the operational needs of global national security institutions."

Oracle CTO Larry Ellison riffed on multiple topics at Oracle AI World. A big topic was healthcare. Let's roll the video.

Oh boy, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman raised a ruckus over a comment about how having RAM on your PC, a presumably phone too, is such a waste. It should all be in the data center. Tom's Hardware recapped the comment at the 29-minute mark in a podcast.

"From a global allocation perspective, actually, it's quite terrible to have everybody have a bunch of the world's limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer and being used 5% of the time. You want maximum utilization in the cloud if you're trying to deal with this very supply-constrained environment. And somehow many people's intuition is the opposite of that."

Now Altman is a DRAM vampire.

The comment by itself isn't that surprising and technically not wrong. What's off putting about the whole thing, other than the fact it came from Altman, is what I call meathead AI. The assumption is that the architecture has to revolve around some AI data center taking up an entire state (essentially a big ass mainframe). The more elegant solution would be coming up with some peer-to-peer model where you rent the compute from devices with extra to spare. Including my PC. Yes, there would have to be some payment model, but I'd be cheaper than the trillions of dollars OpenAI is already on the hook for (and probably can't pay).

And it's not my newsletter.

If you're into a 145 page read on how AI will turn out when models commoditize give The Commanding Heights a read. It's a lot of scrolling so I recommend either listening to it or download the PDF to send to your Kindle or something.

• Models become commodities. Frontier models add capabilities, but lose pricing power. Falling prices shift value to distribution, market access and those economic things that usually win.
• AI spending becomes politically indispensable. AI investment won't end because everything in the economy, like your retirement, depends on it.
• Frontier AI becomes sovereign infrastructure. Think Anthropic.gov.
• Dollar dominance expands. Dollar stablecoins could become payment infrastructure for AI-driven commerce, increasing Treasury demand and rewarding payment intermediaries. This argument is the shakiest to me.
• Productivity gains widen inequality. Owners capture expanding margins while outsourcing workers. Developing economies lose established paths to prosperity.
• Companies become smaller. A few operators directing models replace larger employee organizations.

Intel reported third quarter earnings of 60 cents a share on revenue of $16.5 billion, up 21% from a year ago. Non-GAAP earnings were 52 cents a share.

Intel's non-GAAP earnings topped estimates by 12 cents a share. The company's data center business in the third quarter had revenue of $7.3 billion, up 78% from a year ago.

The company said fourth quarter revenue will be $15 billion to $16 billion with non-GAAP earnings of 25 cents a share.

Here's the deck.

DoorDash said it will buy Instacart for $17 billion. The companies said the merger will provide more choices, combine platforms and offer two memberships for the price of one. DoorDash will keep Instacart's brand, enterprise technology products and app.

Nvidia released Nemotron 3.5 Transcribe and Granary v2 on Hugging Face. Nemotron 3.5 is focused on multilingual transcription, speaker attribution, translation and audio Q&A. Granary v2 is an open data pipeline model with fine-tuning recipes to adapt it.