Every week NAND Research puts out a newsletter for our industry customers taking a look at what’s driving the week, and what happened last week that caught our attention. Below is a excerpt from this week’s, February 17, 2025.

Driving the Week

It’s a quiet week in enterprise infrastructure with no major events and only light earnings. We are, however, expecting a handful of interesting announcements to materialize, so stay tuned.

One the earnings front, we’re watching out for Analog Devices and Arista to report out on Wednesday, while Alibaba, Five9, and Rackspace all announce on Thursday.

This is the calm before the storm as everyone holds their breath for Nvidia’s earnings next week – along with some big infrastructure companies.

AI’s Big Week

The Paris AI Summit wrapped up with nearly 100 nations at the table, trying to figure out who runs the AI world. While leaders nodded along to grand statements on safety and progress, the real story was in the divisions:

• EUROPE GOES ALL IN: European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen pushed for a unified EU AI strategy, hoping to fast-track regulations to keep up with the U.S. and China.
• U.S. SAYS “CHILL”: VP JD Vance cautioned against over-regulating AI, warning that too many rules could suffocate innovation. No surprise there.
• FRANCE FLEXES: Macron’s government locked in a cool €109 billion in AI investments from heavyweights like Brookfield and the UAE.
• UK & U.S. STAY ON THE SIDELINES: Neither country signed the summit’s declaration on AI ethics and sustainability. The message? We’ll do it our way.

Skepticism was expressed by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei who clearly isn’t impressed. He called the Paris AI Summit a “missed opportunity”, arguing that discussions were too vague, lacked industry-specific takeaways, and failed to address the real challenges AI companies face.

Call my Agent! You can’t avoid Agentic AI, those autonomous digital agents that promise to perform complex AI-coordinated tasks without human intervention. While the major SaaS players, like Microsoft and Salesforce, are moving full-steam ahead to embrace the capabilities, concerns about reliability and security persist, with the Wall Street Journal reporting that 75% of IT leaders are feeling that AI’s value hasn’t yet matched the hype in its appropriated titled piece AI Agents are Everywhere… and Nowhere.

That’s not stopping AI-powered search darling Glean, which last week launched Glean Agents, its no-code platform enabling employees to create AI agents that can access and analyze data across the enterprise.

Infrastructure

Data Infrastructure is evolving the meet the needs of AI, so it’s no surprise to see DataCore expanding its storage portfolio by acquiring the Arcastream parallel file system technology from Frech tech company Kalray.

Arcastream is a unified SDS system based on IBM Storage Scale-based block, file, and object.  No word on what DataCore paid for the technology, but it’s a nice piece of technology.

Raising the bar for Storage Performance: AI data infrastructure darling WEKA set new records across all five workloads in the SPECstorage Solution 2020 benchmark earlier this month, running its software on HPE’s Alletra Storage Server 4110 hardware. WEKA showed off 2x+ performance increase on AI image processing, while it saw a 2.7x bump in EDA workloads. Details on their site.

Performance Flash at Entry-Level Prices? Storage stalwart NetApp unleashed a  refresh of its mid-to-low-end all-flash SAN A-Series arrays, introducing the A20, A30, and A50 models. These systems are designed for smaller deployments, including remote or branch offices, with starting prices as low as $25K.

We haven’t seen broad adoption of DPUs, at least outside the hyperscale world, but Cisco just introduced a cost-effective networking solution by integrating its Nexus N9300 switches with AMD’s Pensando DPUs.

This “Smart Switch” approach offloads network applications and accelerates functions, enhancing programmability and efficiency. It’s an ideal use of the technology, and nice validation for AMD. 

There’s a new server in town, as HPE expands its Gen12 ProLiant server lineup, now powered by Intel’s “Granite Rapids” Xeon 6 processors.

Deal Watch

You can’t please everyone: In the first IPO of 2025, cybersecurity player SailPoint re-listed. The IPO met expectations, landing at a $12.8 billion valuation at open. Despite the respectable launch, it didn’t pop as loudly as some would’ve like, leading outlets like TechCrunch to report that SailPoint’s Dull Debut did little to loosen the Stuck IPO Window.

Reporting without opinion: tech CEO and OpenAI co-founder Elon Musk proposed a $97.4 billion buy-out of OpenAI. OpenAI’s board unanimously rejected the unsolicited bid, reaffirming their commitment to remain independent and focused on their mission.

Expanding to the edge, NXP Semiconductors has acquired Kinara, a company specializing in edge AI NPUs for a reported $307 million. The acquisition brings solid IP for edge AI solutions across automotive, industrial, and IoT.

Seagate Technology announced its intended acquisition of Intevac, maker of hard-disk media manufacturing equipment, for $119 million. Intevac has unique IP for building HAMR-based HDDs – technology that Seagate announced in December that it’s nearly ready to ship. You don’t find better synergy than this.

What We’re Reading

The data center power crisis is real, and we’ve been hearing from data center builders that nuclear just might be the answer. The Information delves into the idea in its piece that says Nuclear Investing, No Longer Radioactive.

Arm is making interesting moves, with rumors percolating that its about get into the custom chip business, potentially competing with its own customers like Broadcom and Marvell. Helping to understand where the company is heading, the Financial Times has a long conversation with Arm CEO Rene Haas in Arm’s CEO on the Future of AI and Why He Does Not Fear DeepSeek, who remains tight-lipped:

“The question now is where the next boost will come from. There have been reports that Arm will start building its own chip, a move that would be a radical departure from its royalty and licensing-based business model. I press Haas on when this might happen but he does not want to say more.”

You’ll have to listen to this one: Long-time tech pub Wired Magazine repeatedly scooped more politically-focused journalists in its coverage of Elon Musk’s DOGE  team as it works its way across DC. NPR & WYNC’s On the Media delves into why in its recent episode How Wired Magazine is Scooping the Competition.

Companies mentioned: AMD, Anthropic, Arm, Cisco, DataCore, Glean, HPE, Intevac, Kalray, Kinara, Microsoft, NetApp, NXP, OpenAI, SailPoint, Salesforce, Seagate Technology, WEKA