Research Notes

Marvell to Acquire Lumentum

Steve McDowell November 3, 2026

Marvell’s $115 billion all-stock deal for Lumentum explained, covering strategic rationale, Qualcomm’s AWS optics challenge, and what it means for AI networking buyers.

IBM Connects Two 120-Qubit Processors With 99% State-Transfer Fidelity

Steve McDowell October 29, 2026

IBM links two 120-qubit Nighthawk processors with meter-scale L-couplers at 99% state-transfer fidelity. Analysis of the engineering gaps on the road to Starling.

Oracle Deep Trust AI Architecture

Steve McDowell October 28, 2026

Oracle Deep Trust AI Architecture moves access control and business rules into the database to govern AI agents. See how it compares with Snowflake, Databricks, and AWS.

Intel to Acquire Classiq, Build a Full-Stack Quantum Platform

Steve McDowell October 27, 2026

Intel will acquire Classiq to add quantum software to its silicon spin-qubit stack. Analysis covers the rationale, risks, and rivals including Qiskit and CUDA-Q.

llm-d 1.0 Open Distributed Inference for Production AI

Steve McDowell October 21, 2026

The llm-d project recently released version 1.0, the first stable release of an open-source, Kubernetes-native framework for distributing large language model inference across fleets of accelerators. llm-d sits above inference engines such as vLLM and SGLang, adding routing, cache management, and scheduling across model servers.

Veeam Intelligent ResOps for Microsoft 365

Steve McDowell October 19, 2026

Veeam announced that its Intelligent ResOps (iResOps) for Microsoft 365 is now generally available. The product is an add-on to Veeam Data Cloud for Microsoft 365 that discovers Microsoft Copilot and other AI agents within a tenant, maps the sensitive data each agent can access, identifies redundant, obsolete, and trivial (ROT) content, and allows administrators to reverse agent-driven file changes, one file at a time.