Google flexes its Arm; Metronome runs the meter
Today: Google's first custom Arm server processor is now available, Metronome's new tool could help SaaS companies switch to usage-based pricing, and the quote of the week.
Today: how a narrow miss on cloud growth raises questions about Microsoft's AI spending, why Nvidia wants AI-curious businesses to use its new managed deployment services, and the latest funding rounds in enterprise tech.
Welcome to Runtime! Today: how a narrow miss on cloud growth raises questions about Microsoft's AI spending, why Nvidia wants AI-curious businesses to use its new managed deployment services, and the latest funding rounds in enterprise tech.
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No enterprise tech company has been more closely identified with the generative AI boom than Microsoft, which staked billions of dollars in late 2022 on the premise that AI will forever change the way businesses build and use software. Investors have been looking for signs of progress toward that goal ever since, and they didn't like what they saw from its fourth-quarter earnings results.
Microsoft shares fell more than 6% in after-hours trading Tuesday after Microsoft reported Azure growth of 29%, which fell short of Wall Street's expectations for 31% growth according to CNBC. Overall revenue and profits beat those expectations, but Azure growth is the most closely watched metric for assessing Microsoft's success in getting enterprise customers to buy into the glorious AI future they've been promised.
Microsoft 365 is the other important product for assessing Microsoft's AI fortunes, thanks to the introduction of the 365 Copilot product last November, and the news there was a little better.
The sell-off rebounded as Nadella and Hood ran through their talking points on the conference call, but the stock was still down almost 4% after the call ended. While almost every company in tech would trade places with Microsoft in a heartbeat and slightly disappoint investors by reporting net income of $22 billion, the amount of money it is spending on AI infrastructure makes those same investors more nitpicky.
It takes a long time for capital expenditures to pay off as revenue. As long as Microsoft continues to print money from its overall business, investor grumbling should be muted.
Nvidia's rise to the top of the AI boom has always had as much to do with its software strategy as its GPUs, which are still hot commodities. This week it rolled out several new additions to its NIM (Nvidia inference microservices) family of AI app containers that were designed to make it easier for businesses to deploy AI into production.
NIMs are a collection of packaged APIs that are part of Nvidia's AI Enterprise service and allow corporate applications to run inference workloads against popular AI models. They can be deployed to Kubernetes and coordinate the interactions between chips, AI models, and all the software needed to use AI without having to stitch together the pieces.
The new NIMs promise to let companies build their own somewhat-creepy "digital human" assistants and use RAG (retrieval-augmented generation), a technique designed to improve the accuracy of AI model results. However, they don't come cheap: The Nvidia AI Enterprise service costs $4,500 per GPU used per year, according to Bloomberg.
Altana raised $200 million in Series C funding that elevates the supply-chain software company to unicorn status.
Chainguard secured $140 million in Series C funding as it expands its security services for companies that want to identify risks in their software supply chains.
Credo AI landed $21 million in new funding to help companies introduce governance standards across their AI applications.
Lineaje raised $20 million in Series A funding for its own approach to software supply-chain security, which helps companies produce a software bill of materials.
Lakera scored $20 million in Series A funding to help businesses using LLMs defend against prompt-injection attacks.
Monto launched with $9 million in seed funding to bring its simplified business-to-business payments software to U.S. customers.
Bausch Health is the latest Snowflake customer to confirm that sensitive data was stolen by hackers who bypassed weak account security controls, 404 Media reported.
Apple trained its newest LLMs on Google Cloud's TPU chips rather than Nvidia's GPUs, it revealed in a paper this week.
AMD reported data-center revenue growth doubled compared to last year, and raised its guidance for this year.
SAP shook up its leadership team, and Chief Marketing and Solutions Officer Julia White and Chief Revenue Officer Scott Russell are out according to CIO.
Clickhouse acquired PeerDB to add new Postgres capabilities to its data warehouse.
World records are falling this week, and not just in Paris: The Dark Angels ransomware group recently received a payment of $75 million, which appears to be a new high (or low).
Thanks for reading — see you Thursday!