Investors think AI is going to kill or at least maim software-as-a-service companies, and a lot more.
That seems a tad early, frankly, even if AI could slow SaaS’ growth story — which is why the likes of ServiceNow, Salesforce and even Palantir have seen their stocks hammered.
As Dare Obasanjo, a former longtime Microsoft software engineer, put it succinctly, “Wall Street has gone from thinking AI is a bubble to thinking AI is an iceberg and the software industry is the Titanic. … As usual wall street is a bunch of clueless fratboys who have no idea how the pieces they gamble with work.” Onetime Microsoft exec Steve Sinofsky isn’t buying it either: “Death of software. Nah. … There will more software than ever before.”
And the overreaction is a little odd coming at the same time that investors also are increasingly wary of AI companies and their massive spending on infrastructure and whether ROI will justify it. Alphabet, for instance, logged a fabulous quarter that put to rest the notion that AI would kill its business — but its stock declined 4% the next day after it said capital spending is going even higher. Same at Amazon, only its shares fell almost 10% after-hours Thursday. Oracle remains under pressure, especially after saying it’s going to raise $50 billion to build more. And Microsoft last week freaked out investors with its planned capex — though Dave Vellante thinks they’re wrong.
Still, all this hasn’t much affected investment in AI disruptors such as ElevenLabs. And even AI chipmakers such as IPO-bound Cerebras and Positron keep getting bucketloads of funding, as investors (their investors, at least) bet that the shortage of graphics processing units that power the AI boom leaves room and margin for alternatives to Nvidia.
Meanwhile, it’s a scrum in AI business models, as OpenAI aims to try advertising to pay those fearsome bills — and Google already is — while Anthropic says, “Nope!” with a series of ads ripping the idea of ads on chatbots. Meanwhile, the two independent leaders continue to battle with new models.
There’s so much going on in AI that Elon Musk’s announcement of that his SpaceX will buy his xAI before, oh yeah, going public later this year got only a day or two’s news attention.
Waymo looks to press its advantage over everyone else in self-driving cars, in particular Musk’s Tesla, with plans to raise $16 billion.
Bellwether earnings next week: Cisco, Arista, Cloudflare, Applied Materials, Check Point Software and Datadog.
Here’s all of this week’s enterprise and emerging tech news, analysis and opinion from SiliconANGLE and beyond:
Microsoft investors fret as capital spending and Azure growth decouple But they’re overreacting, Vellante says.
The threat of new AI tools wiped $300B off software and data stocks this week — wait, make that $1 trillion. They’re also likely overreacting, at least for the short term.
AI agents could crush enterprise infrastructure, says Cockroach Labs CEO
Agents in the enterprise: Salesforce and DeepL see productivity move the needle as use cases grow for AI
Five thoughts – plus a comment on the importance of leadership – from Cisco’s 2026 AI Summit: I could only attend online, but this had quite the blockbuster lineup, as Zeus Kerravala notes, gently aimed at positioning Cisco at the center of AI infrastructure and (with its growing cybersecurity portfolio) AI trust. A few other tidbits that struck me:
Claude is a space to think, says Anthropic, by which it says it won’t put advertising on its chatbot, in stark contrast to OpenAI’s apparent plans: Anthropic’s hilarious Super Bowl spot skewers potential AI ads – but OpenAI chief Sam Altman protests
How often do AI chatbots lead users down a harmful path? Relatively rarely, but still too much.
Voice AI startup ElevenLabs more than triples valuation in $500M round
Skyryse raises $300M+ for its AI flight control system
Fundamental launches with $255M and an AI model optimized for tabular data
Snowflake bypasses Microsoft to strike $200M multiyear deal with OpenAI
Goodfire raises $150M in funding to enhance its AI interpretability platform
Resolve AI raises $125M at $1B valuation to automate application maintenance
Shield AI raises $100M to acquire more managed service providers
Fieldguide raises $75M on $700M valuation to scale agentic AI for audit and advisory firms
AI-native accounting platform Accrual raises $75M in funding
IBM invests in generative AI app design startup Anima
OpenText to divest Vertica for $150M
GenLogs secures $60M to keep tabs on trucking industry with AI and roadside sensors
Alaffia Health raises $55M to expand agentic AI for health plan claims operations
AI startup Phylo nabs $13.5M for its ‘integrated biology environment’
Raising $6.1M in seed funding, Airrived says agentic AI’s breakthrough moment has arrived
Expert Intelligence raises $4.7M to automate decision-making in laboratory environments
OpenAI launches Codex app for macOS to speed up software projects
OpenAI introduces Frontier agent management platform and new GPT-5.3-Codex model
Anthropic rolls out Claude Opus 4.6 with 1 million-token context support
Snowflake bets on platform-native AI as enterprises rethink custom development
Dassault and Nvidia partner to build industrial AI platform
Higgsfield launches ‘vibe’ editor for creating motion graphics
Clearnote debuts legal AI platform for music and entertainment professionals
Corti launches multi-agent AI framework for healthcare
Umanitek launches Guardian Agent to tackle AI hallucinations, deepfakes and identity abuse
Portal26 targets weak enterprise AI returns with new Value Realization platform
From RFID to real-time AI: How a decade of AWS and NFL Next Gen Stats has rewritten the playbook
Alphabet to jack up AI spending as Google Cloud and ad business revenues shine
Amazon’s stock falls after it ups its 2026 capital spending forecast to $200B
Palantir rallies as revenue jumps 70% and guidance leaves Wall Street behind
Shares of Qualcomm and Arm slide following latest earnings reports
NXP beats expectations and its forecast is bullish, but investors shrug
AMD beats expectations but guidance fails to excite investors and stock falls
Supermicro knocks it out of the park, as AI server sales drive 120% revenue increase
Atlassian shares slide as cloud growth outlook tempers strong earnings beat
Cybersecurity earnings season kicks off with beats from Fortinet, NetScout and Qualys
Tenable pops after blowout earnings and bullish 2026 outlook
Oracle unveils $50B fundraising plan to fuel AI data center ambitions
Positron AI raises $230M at over $1B valuation to build energy-efficient AI accelerator hardware
Gruve, a provider of AI inference services and infrastructure, raises $50M Series A follow-on round
The network is the new production truck: Why NBC Sports is betting big on AI networking for the 2026 Winter Games
Western Digital outlines new HDD capacity, performance and power gains for AI workloads
SolarWinds bets on partners with richer incentives and deeper enablement
AI agent social network Moltbook left millions of credentials publicly exposed
Securonix warns of Dead#Vax malware campaign abusing Windows fileless execution
Identity intelligence firm Fingerprint launches AI agent signature ecosystem for the web
Operant AI debuts Agent Protector to secure autonomous AI agents at scale
Zscaler snaps up SquareX to strengthen browser security without enterprise browsers
Semperis acquires MightyID to extend identity resilience across cloud identity platforms
RapidFort raises $42M to push continuous remediation for software supply chain security
Orion Security raises $32 million to advance autonomous data loss prevention
Radicl secures $31M to expand AI-driven security operations for small businesses
Nullify raises $12.5M to scale AI workforce for product security
Elon Musk confirms SpaceX has acquired xAI to accelerate his space-based data center plans
Alphabet’s robotaxi startup Waymo looks to raise $16B at $110B valuation
X’s Paris HQ raided by French cybercrime officers over Grok chatbot
Satellite maker CesiumAstro raises $470M to grow its manufacturing capacity
Bedrock Robotics raises $270M to scale autonomous construction fleets
LimX raises $200M to build embodied intelligence for humanoid robotics
Tomorrow.io raises $175M to deploy its AI-native weather satellite constellation
TRM Labs raises $70M at $1B valuation as demand surges for blockchain intelligence
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy named Dharmesh Mehta, VP of Worldwide Selling Partner Services, as his new technical advisor, a role that often leads to high leadership positions in the company (Jassy was Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ technical advisor back in the day). Amit Agarwal, SVP of International Emerging Stores, will expand his role to lead Selling Partner Services.
Tuesday, Feb. 10: Datadog, Cloudflare, Teradata, Lyft, Robinhood, Freshworks, Rapid7, Lattice Semi
Wednesday, Feb. 11: Cisco, Pegasystems, GlobalFoundries, Confluent, Fastly, Hubspot
Thursday, Feb. 12: Check Point Software, Applied Materials, Arista, Twilio, JFrog, Coinbase
