Each 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, April 28, 2025.
Driving the Week
Cybersecurity is on the collective minds of about 45,000 IT and cyber pros, all headed to San Francisco for the annual RSA Conference.
It’s also a big earnings week:
- Monday: NXP Semi and F5 Networks.
- Tuesday: Amazon, Commvault, Seagate, Super Micro
- Wednesday: Microsoft, Meta, Open Text, Qualcomm, Western Digital
- Thursday: Apple, Atlassian, Juniper
Heard & Overheard
The unstoppable OpenAI is in rumored negotiations to acquire Windsurf for about $3 billion. Windsurf specializes in AI-assisted coding, a breakout early GenAI use-case – competing with Cursor and nearly every IDE’s CoPilot coding assistant. We’re not sure about the price tag, but the capabilities are a good match for OpenAI.
A new AI accelerator is in the works for China, with the Wall Street Journal citing sources that say Chinese tech powerhouse Huawei will be shipping its new Ascend 910D part as early as next month, with capabilities matching NVIDIA’s H20. It’s too early to know if any of this is true, but pay attention – this would be a blow to NVIDIA following news that its China-targeted H20 may be put on the export control list.
Arriving sooner than expected? According to the Commercial Times, NVIDIA is moving up its production schedule for its next generation B300 GPUs to May. The B300 will be built on TSMC’s 5nm nodes using CoWoS-L packaging. If true, this won’t be an American-made part, as CoWoS-L isn’t yet up at TSMC’s fab in Arizona, but rather its AP8 site in Taiwan.
Enterprise AI Infrastructure
AI is changing how we think about storage, with most of the action happening within the nimble storage start-up world. The latest optimizations focus on managing the context window for a given GPU (what WEKA delightfully called “Tokenomics” in a nice backgrounder on the approach).
Last month WEKA rolled out its Augmented Data Grid to mitigate the limitations of GPU memory for large-scale inferencing by extending KV cache to directly-attached storage. Last week VAST Data announced that it’s open-sourcing its similar (but more constrained) VUA KV cache technology.
Meanwhile Hammerspace is heading in this direction, building on its Tier 0 technology. Phison is also providing a key building block with its aiDAPTIV+ technology, which is being productized in a new deal with StorONE.
NVIDIA clearly likes the approach, making it a key element of its forthcoming Dynamo inferencing framework (which we’ve heard leverages some of WEKA’s open-source technology).
We’re eagerly waiting to see what the traditional storage OEMs are going to do in this space. They all support the prerequisite NVIDIA GPUDirect, but none have yet made announcements. Perhaps they’re waiting to use Dynamo. We’ll be asking the question at the upcoming Dell Tech World, Pure Storage Accelerate, and HPE Discover events (we’ll just call NetApp, whose Insight event isn’t until October).
Transitions
There was a lot of movement over the past week. Let’s jump right in:
Just in time for RSAC, former Wiz executive Trish Cagliostro is joining Orchid Security, a startup specializing in identity control, as its new CRO.
Tenable, a cyber company specializing in exposure management, appointed Steve Vintz and Mark Thurmond as co-CEOs following the passing of CEO and chairman Amit Yoran. Vintz was most previously Tenable’s CFO while Thurmond was its COO. Two-in-a-box can be tricky, but these two have worked together for a long time and have nicely complementary skills. We wish them both good success.
Leading liquid cooling company CoolIT announced that Jason Waxman is its new CEO. He was most previously president of Fluke (if you don’t know them, you’d know their test equipment).
WEKA continues to retool its executive ranks, bringing in heavyweights Ajay Singh as its new chief product officer and Brian Froehling as its new CRO. Current CRO Nilesh Patel is moving into WEKA’s CSO role, where he’ll also be its GM of Alliances and Corporate Development.
Staying with storage, Hammerspace hired Tom Whaley as its new VP of Americas. Tom brings an interesting perspective to the job, having previously done time at both WEKA and VAST Data.
What We’re Reading
What’s the problem with employees? Honestly, more than we care to detail, but that won’t stop the Financial Times, which takes a deep look at The Problem with Workers Who Can’t Think for Themselves: “I have recently started hearing a new complaint from employers: that their workers are not free thinkers.”
It’s a problem with the how college students are taught, the FT’s experts claim:
“A focus on incentives such as grades or university places discourages discursive thinking. Undergraduates I have worked with want handrails and instructions detailed to the point of what font they should use… “
Who’s doing it right? Unsurprisingly, it’s Singapore:
“This is not the case everywhere. In Singapore, educationalists have worried their high-achieving schools produced students who were more like machines accepting a download than real thinkers. Using an approach called ‘Teach Less, Learn More’ schools began to relax timetables to allow more space for art and music, for students to choose a broader range of subjects and work more collaboratively.”
Not everyone can afford a new laptop. The Verge takes us on a fascinating journey as it details The Rise of ‘Frankenstein’ Laptops in New Delhi’s Repair Markets:
“Across India, in metro markets from Delhi’s Nehru Place to Mumbai’s Lamington Road, technicians like Prasad are repurposing broken and outdated laptops that many see as junk. These ‘Frankenstein’ machines — hybrids of salvaged parts from multiple brands — are sold to students, gig workers, and small businesses, offering a lifeline to those priced out of India’s growing digital economy.”
Finally, there’s been a lot of semiconductor news lately. It’s worth taking a look back, letting IEEE Spectrum tell The Forgotten Story of how IBM Invented the Automated Fab. If you follow semis, it’s worth the click.
Companies Mentioned: CoolIT, Dell, Hamerspace, HPE, Huawai, NetApp, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Orchid Security, Phison, Pure Storage, StorONE, Tenable, VAST Data, WEkA, Windsurf
