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 the upcoming launch of Nvidia's Blackwell chips and the growth of upstart AI clouds could change how companies buy infrastructure, the discovery of a widespread telecom hack serves as a reminder that legal backdoors are problematic, and the latest funding rounds in enterprise tech.
Welcome to Runtime! Today: How the upcoming launch of Nvidia's Blackwell chips and the growth of upstart AI clouds could change how companies buy infrastructure, the discovery of a widespread telecom hack serves as a reminder that legal backdoors are problematic, and the latest funding rounds in enterprise tech.
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During the last two years of the AI investment frenzy Nvidia's GPUs have been the hottest commodity in SIlicon Valley, replacing the sleeveless fleece vests and Allbirds that ruled before the pandemic. But as a new generation of Nvidia GPUs trickles out and AI usage patterns start to change, tech buyers will have options for finding AI hardware, and that could shuffle the pecking order of infrastructure tech.
Nvidia's new Blackwell H200 chip is expected to deliver a substantial performance increase over the H100, the chip that launched the generative AI boom. After the company ironed out some packaging problems that delayed mass production of the chip earlier this year, the first H200s are starting to roll out this week.
All the major cloud providers will eventually get their hands on Blackwell, although they'll likely grumble about their allocation. But the smaller, AI-focused cloud companies such as CoreWeave that were just getting started two years ago are armed with far more investment and a much stronger track record of service delivery at this point, and if Blackwell remains in tight supply well into 2025 other AI chips could gain traction.
But as investment in AI infrastructure shifts from training to inference, which most providers expect to make up the bulk of AI workloads over the rest of the decade, it should also become much easier to find processing power.
Details are still emerging about what appears to have been a massive hack of U.S. telecom infrastructure, which according to the Wall Street Journal was conducted by "hackers linked to the Chinese government." The group is known as Salt Typhoon under Microsoft's threat-actor naming convention, and "for months or longer, the hackers might have held access to network infrastructure used to cooperate with lawful U.S. requests for communications data," according to the report.
According to Techcrunch, U.S. telecom and internet providers are required to maintain a system that allows federal law enforcement officials to obtain communications data in the course of an investigation. But as security professionals have argued for years, it's basically impossible to build a "secure" backdoor into a network or operating system that won't be abused by outside groups bent on intelligence gathering or financial gain.
The most likely scenario advanced by a Washington Post article is that China wanted to figure out how and where U.S. authorities were surveilling Chinese targets. But the group could have also had access to unencrypted business traffic as well.
Poolside raised $500 million in Series B funding (!) to further its work on AI coding assistants.
Crescendo scored $50 million in Series C funding as it builds a generative AI platform for call centers, which is likely to be the first place that AI agents take hold.
Voyage AI landed $20 million in Series A funding from rivals Snowflake and Databricks, among others, for its work on turning files into "embeddings" that can be understood by AI models.
VESSL AI raised $12 million in Series A funding to help businesses use AI models in production.
Lightdash secured $11 million in Series A funding as it builds out a series of open-source developer tools that allow companies to build easy-to-use business-intelligence dashboards.
Cloudflare acquired Kivera, a startup working on cloud deployment security, for an undisclosed sum.
AWS CEO Matt Garman confirmed the company is pruning services in an interview with TechCrunch, arguing "you can’t build everything" but also saying "we take it seriously if companies are going to bet their business on us supporting things for the long term."
Thanks for reading — see you Thursday!