Larry Dignan

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
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• Forward deployed engineers: The promise, peril in AI deployments

Google launched a new laptop called Googlebook, which has a unified operating system that blends ChromeOS and Android. The device is designed to work well with the Android ecosystem and create a seamless phone-laptop combination.

Googlebook will also be designed for Gemini Intelligence, which is a key part of Android 17.

Pricing is to be determined but the launch is expected in the fall. Expect to hear a lot more about Googlebook at Google I/O next month.

GitLab said it will cut jobs and the number of countries where it operates. In a memo, GitLab laid out the plan and what it means. The company said it is cutting jobs to free up money to invest in AI agents and innovate.

CEO Bill Staples said the company is planning to have a flatter org, deliver faster innovation and rewire internal processes for AI agents. Staples also outlined its 10 core beliefs going forward and reiterated its first quarter outlook.

The biggest question about GitLab is why it hasn't been able to take business from GitHub, which has had its struggles of late.

OpenAI said it has launched Daybreak, a security initiative that combines its frontier models and Codex Security to help patch vulnerabilities.

Canvas, the learning management system that powers universities, was taken out during many finals and just as final grades were due. I know since I beat the deadline and the Canvas outage.

The outages was due to a ransomware attack and Instructure's response and communication had some issues. In a long updates, Instructure detailed the Canvas outage, delivered an apology and noted that it "reached an agreement with the unauthorized actor involved in this incident."

Instructure said the data was returned, it got confirmation of data destruction and said no customers were extorted.

This post is worth a read:

"The 90 day responsible disclosure window was built for a world where bug finders were rare and exploit development was slow. That world is gone. LLMs have compressed both timelines to near-zero. I have seen it first hand, and so has everyone else paying attention. This post lays out why the old model is broken, with real stories, and makes one ask to the industry: treat every critical security issue as P0 and patch it immediately. Not tomorrow. Not next sprint. Now."

Cloudflare said it will cut more than 1,100 employees as it reorganizes for agentic AI. In a memo, Cloudflare outlined the cuts:

"We have to be intentional in how we architect our company for the agentic AI era in order to supercharge the value we deliver to our customers."

Separately, Cloudflare reported a better-than-expected first quarter, but delivered a mixed second quarter outlook. the company projected second quarter revenue of $664 million to $665 million, just short of estimates.

Mozilla did a deep dive on how it used Anthropic's Claude Mythos Preview to find vulnerabilities and fix them. The short version is in a chart.

CoreWeave reported first quarter results, said its revenue backlog was pushing $100 billon and has surpassed 1GW of active power. Like previous quarters, CoreWeave is growing exponentially, but it is losing money just as quickly.

The AI cloud provider reported a first quarter net loss of $740 million, or $1.40 a share, on revenue of $2.077 billion. In the quarter, CoreWeave landed deals with Meta and Anthropic and expanded deals with Cohere and Mistral. CoreWeave also launched more flexible pricing models.

CoreWeave said it expects revenue to be between $2.45 billion and $2.6 billion, below the $2.7 billion Wall Street estimate. CoreWeave reaffirmed its 2026 outlook of revenue between $12 billion and $13 billion.

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