Research Feed: Steve McDowell
HPE Discover: Agentic Governance, Vera CPU, and Confidential Computing added to AI Factory w/ NVIDIA
Hewlett Packard Enterprise extended its HPE AI Factory with NVIDIA to support production-ready agentic AI deployments at its just-wrapped HPE Discover 2026. The announcements add governance, security, and compute capabilities for organizations moving AI agents into operational production environments.
HPE Discover: Self-Driving Networks and AI Data Center Switching for the Agentic Enterprise
At its recent HPE Discover event in Las Vegas, Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced a broad set of networking updates spanning AI data center switching, autonomous network operations, and unified secure access, extending its “self-driving” networking strategy into general availability across AI factories, data centers, campus, and edge environments.
HPE Discover 2026: The First True Look at HPE + Juniper
HPE is now a networking company with a compute business. Not the other way around.
Huntsman-Olin: The $300 Million Promise
The CIO role is the one to watch next. Whoever gets that seat inherits both transformation programs, both mid-flight ERP decisions, and a 24-month deadline with a nine-figure number attached to it.
Arista Networks’ Next-Generation 1.6 Terabit Portfolio for AI Fabrics
Arista Networks recently announced its new 7060XE7 Series, a portfolio of 1.6 Terabit (1.6T) Ethernet switching platforms designed for rack-scale AI infrastructure. The announcement extends Arista’s Etherlink architecture from 800G to 1.6T and introduces three hardware configurations for air-cooled, liquid-cooled, and high-density 128-port deployments.
IBM’s LLM-Guided Evolutionary Framework for Quantum Error Correction Code Discovery
IBM Research recently published a paper on an LLM-guided evolutionary framework for discovering quantum error-correction (QEC) codes, accompanied by the open-source release of OpenEvolve on GitHub. The framework applies evolutionary artificial intelligence techniques, originally developed for general program synthesis, to the domain of quantum low-density parity-check (qLDPC) codes.
Carrier Satellite JV: SpaceX Panic Disguised as a Partnership
The carriers saw it coming and panicked, but even with SpaceX’s massive lead, satellite technology hits a brick wall of pure physics.
Microsoft’s Majorana 2 Topological Quantum Chip
Microsoft unveiled Majorana 2 at its recent Build developer conference in San Francisco, introducing its second-generation topological quantum chip and announcing the general availability of Microsoft Discovery, an agentic AI platform for scientific research and development.
Majorana 2 delivers qubits that are 1,000 times more reliable than those in its predecessor, Majorana 1, with a mean qubit lifetime of 20 seconds and peak instances approaching 1 minute.
Quantinuum’s $1.68 Billion IPO & the Race to Quantum Commercialization
Quantinuum opened trading on the Nasdaq last week (symbol: QNT), raising $1.68 billion in the largest traditional IPO to date for a pure-play quantum computing company.
Priced at $60 per share, above the marketed range of $53 to $55, and oversubscribed by a double-digit multiple before trading began, the debut caps a multi-year run of technical milestones, high-profile partnerships, and deepening enterprise engagement.
Qualcomm’s Dragonwing IQ10 Robotics Reference Design
At the recent Computex 2026, Qualcomm introduced the Dragonwing IQ10 Robotics Reference Design (RRD), the company’s most concrete commitment to the physical AI market to date. The new platform consolidates compute, sensor interfaces, deterministic I/O, networking, and a layered software stack into a single enclosed reference design for autonomous mobile robots (AMRs), industrial robotics, and humanoid platforms.
Microsoft: Project Solara & the Agentic Operating Plane for the Non-NVIDIA World
At its recent Build 2026 event, Microsoft introduced Project Solara, a chip-to-cloud platform built specifically for devices whose primary interface is an AI agent. Solara
Cisco’s Full-Stack Play for Agentic Enterprise AI
At Cisco Live 2026 in Las Vegas, Cisco unveiled Cisco Cloud Control, a unified management plane designed for human operators and AI agents to jointly run and defend enterprise infrastructure. The platform anchors Cisco’s AgenticOps operating model, unifying networking, security, compute, observability, and collaboration under a single login and a shared data layer.