The AI backlash intensifies, China gains on the US leaders, and IBM tanks

The AI backlash intensifies, China gains on the US leaders, and IBM tanks You know a technology is getting serious acceptance when even people in the business shift from telling the government to butt out to calling for more regulation. This is where we’re at with artificial intelligence today. A raft of AI leaders and economists this week called for a new regulatory approach to AI in part to address concerns such as potential job losses, following the leaders of OpenAI, Anthropic and others tossing out their takes on how to do that. This week Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis also called for creating an AI standards body. Whether anything comes of all this remains uncertain. Some who are more rabid in their opposition to AI’s impacts are even talking of potential violence, prompting some execs to hire armed bodyguards. Hopefully that proves to be overkill. But meantime, the opposition to AI has fixated on data centers, with their impacts on local power, water and pollution. And they’re having some impact. New York Governor Kathy Hochul recently signed an executive order mandating the country’s first and no doubt not the last moratorium on data centers that power all this AI. But that’s not slowing some companies down. This week Facebook and Instagram parent Meta Platforms almost doubled its planned spending on the massive Hyperion data center in Louisiana, to $50 billion. And data center operator Switch is looking at an IPO that could raise up to $10 billion. Neocloud QumulusAI also just went public via a direct listing. This week brought another shock to U.S. AI leaders, as China’s Moonshot AI released a new Kimi model that edges ever closer to the leaders in various capabilities. The rise of China and perhaps other regions as AI leaders to rival the U.S. is likely to throw a spotlight on another growing if misunderstood trend: sovereign AI, or the notion that control of the AI stack is likely to splinter away from just the biggest (mostly U.S.) AI model providers and cloud hyperscalers. “The world is fragmenting into sovereign AI islands — regionalized, regulated, increasingly disconnected deployment environments, each with its own rules, requirements and governance expectations,” wrote Amit Ayal Govrin, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Still, the U.S. has plenty of advantages — most of all, Nvidia. This week it touted its networking chops as the emerging key to scaling up AI, and agents in particular. Vellante and theCUBE Research’s Bob Laliberte talked to Nvidia networking head Gilad Shainer, concluding that despite industry concerns about potential lock-in to Nvidia’s AI factory stack, it’s on the right track when it coming to networking’s pivotal role. Poor IBM. Despite some gains thanks to AI, this week it predicted a shortfall in earnings that tanked its stock, which fell more than 26% Tuesday, as a bunch of big mainframe computer orders didn’t materialize. Second-quarter enterprise earnings season starts in earnest next week with, among others, Alphabet, Intel, SAP, ServiceNow, Tesla and, well, IBM. Here’s all of this week’s enterprise and emerging-tech news and analysis from SiliconANGLE and beyond: Analysis, opinion and food for thought Special report: What is sovereign AI — and why it will decide the winners and losers of the AI race Special Breaking Analysis: Nvidia’s AI networking moat is real – but the lock-in debate continues and the TL;DR: Inside Nvidia’s AI factory networking strategy: New analysis from theCUBE Research Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis calls for creation of AI standards body The hard-line activists ramping up for the war with AI (per the Wall Street Journal Alphabet shares fall on report its most powerful AI model Gemini 3.5 Pro is delayed Microsoft’s Nadella criticizes Anthropic’s Fable for being ‘editorially controlled’ (per CNBC) Faith Tech: Pat Gelsinger steers Gloo’s platform to lead faith-based organizations into the age of AI AI and data: AI under fire Policy New York becomes first US state to impose a data center moratorium New models and services China’s Moonshot throws down the gauntlet with Kimi K3, the world’s largest open-weights model Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines drops Inkling, an open-weights model anyone can access Nvidia launches Cosmos 3 Edge model and expands its physical AI push in Japan Intel says it’s going to lean on Google’s Gemini to help automate and accelerate silicon development Google rebrands NotebookLM as Gemini Notebook, focusing on ecosystem and accessibility Google AI Mode gets more useful with Canva, Instacart and YouTube app integrations Perplexity launches secure sandbox to make its AI agents secure and powerful Oracle opens Fusion Agentic Applications to pro-code developers and coding agents Atlassian evolves Jira into an orchestration hub for developers and AI agents Concho AI turns enterprise codebases into a knowledge layer for AI agents Chipmaker Axelera releases Voyager Wingman to speed edge AI development Creatio expands beyond its no-code roots with conversational development tool and AI studio Cadence extends its AI agents beyond chips with AuraStack for circuit boards and packaging Liquid Instruments launches GenInst Studio to build test instruments by prompt Money matters Databricks set to hit $188B valuation with new investment from Coatue (per the Wall Street Journal–our story coming later) QumulusAI’s direct listing: Accelerating the neocloud for enterprise AI AI infrastructure startup Fireworks closes $1.5B round at $17.5B valuation Emergent emerges as the latest AI unicorn after raising $130M in funding Construction automation startup TerraFirma raises $115M AGI raises $70M to buy up and transform insurance firms into AI-native operations InstaLILY, a developer of AI teammates that can automate complex, business-specific work, raises $60M Microagi nabs $55M to teach factory robots how to work Sovereign AI infrastructure startup Valarian raises $50M to help nations secure their defense systems Construction robot startup Monumental reels in $32M Rime raises $24M Series A to build world’s first enterprise-ready speech-to-speech model Spatial AI startup Augmodo raises $21M to expand beyond retail stores AI DevOps startup MyDecisive launches with $12M and open-source SmartHub Around the enterprise: IBM tanks Policy EU orders Google to share search data with rivals, broaden Android feature access Money matters IBM shares plummet 25% on weak preliminary earnings Stripe and Advent reportedly make $53B bid to take PayPal private TSMC boosts Arizona fab investment by $100B after strong second quarter Meta boosts investment in Hyperion data center campus to $50B+ Spectro Cloud wants to ease AI infrastructure management after raising $100M in funding Flex doubles valuation to $1.2B in six months with $70M Series B1 round Custom AI chip design startup TYLsemi launches with $43M in early-stage funding New products and services Intel starts using ASML’s High NA EUV technology to produce chips Cloudera and Vast Data partner to accelerate data delivery and prevent GPUs from starving Boundless taps idle crypto GPUs to cut AI inference costs Mount Sinai’s Zoom strategy shows why collaboration is now core infrastructure Cyber beat: AI vs. AI Attack & response New services AWS Security Hub expands coverage to Microsoft Azure and beefs up AI protections Cloudflare launches Precursor to catch bots by watching entire sessions Fortinet expands FortiEndpoint with AI monitoring and data controls Tenable folds application security into Tenable One exposure platform Entrust launches Agentic AI Trust Accelerator to move AI agents into production 1Password brings secure credential access to Anthropic’s Claude Sophos launches Fusion, an AI-native ‘defense system’ to unify security tools Ledger launches Agent Stack to keep AI agents away from crypto keys Money matters Elsewhere in tech: Defense tech bulks up Defense technology startup Helsing raises $1.8B at $18B valuation Walden Robotics launches with $300M to put general-purpose robots to work today Singularity lands $80M at $400M valuation to build cheap drone interceptors Mimic Robotics launches highly capable robotic hand that emulates human movements EU paves way for banning social media for children Comings and goings Dave Treadwell will lead AWS Compute and ML Services as Dave Brown departs after 18 years for a “new role outside of the company” — which apparently is at Meta Platforms, to build out its data centers. OpenAI researcher Miles Wang is in talks to launch an AI drug discovery startup valued at $2B. LatentView Analytics appointed Sonal Ramrakhiani CEO. She had been leading Wipro Engineering Edge business unit in the Americas. New Relic named Hein Hellemons chief revenue officer. He was most recently CRO of Darktrace. What’s next Events Wednesday-Thursday, July 22-23: AMD Advancing AI 2026, San Francisco: SiliconANGLE will have all the news and theCUBE and theCUBE Research will be onsite with interviews and analysis. Earnings Tuesday, July 21: Pegasystems Wednesday, July 22: IBM, Alphabet, ServiceNow, Tesla, Texas Instruments Thursday, July 23: Intel, Mobileye, SAP Image: SiliconANGLE/Reve A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE: Support our mission to keep content open and free by engaging with theCUBE community. Join theCUBE’s Alumni Trust Network, where technology leaders connect, share intelligence and create opportunities. 15M+ viewers of theCUBE videos, powering conversations across AI, cloud, cybersecurity and more 11.4k+ theCUBE alumni — Connect with more than 11,400 tech and business leaders shaping the future through a unique trusted-based network. Are you AWS customer? Support SiliconANGLE Financially by buying your AWS services from our Marketplace portal page and links. About SiliconANGLE Media SiliconANGLE Media is a recognized leader in digital media innovation, uniting breakthrough technology, strategic insights and real-time audience engagement. As the parent company of SiliconANGLE, theCUBE Network, theCUBE Research, CUBE365, theCUBE AI and theCUBE SuperStudios — with flagship locations in Silicon Valley and the New York Stock Exchange — SiliconANGLE Media operates at the intersection of media, technology and AI. Founded by tech visionaries John Furrier and Dave Vellante, SiliconANGLE Media has built a dynamic ecosystem of industry-leading digital media brands that reach 15+ million elite tech professionals. Our new proprietary theCUBE AI Video Cloud is breaking ground in audience interaction, leveraging theCUBEai.com neural network to help technology companies make data-driven decisions and stay at the forefront of industry conversations.