Research Notes

Modular ModCon 2026: Impact on Qualcomm and the Broader AI Accelerator Market

Modular held its ModCon 2026 developer conference in San Francisco this week, its first developer conference since Qualcomm completed its acquisition of the company earlier this summer.

The event was both a coming-out party for the newly combined organization and an early proof point for Qualcomm’s bet on buying Modular, namely that ceding control of a piece of its AI software stack to the open-source community is the fastest way to challenge NVIDIA’s CUDA ecosystem.

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FMS 2026: AI Moving Boundaries Between Memory & Storage

The recent FMS 2026 conference in Santa Clara, once organized around flash storage, now functions as an AI memory-and-data-infrastructure conference, confirming a shift that has been building over several product cycles. It’s no wonder the event changed its name from “Flash Memory Summit” to “Future of Memory and Storage.”

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Dell & KIOXIA Bring 9.8PB in 2U to ObjectScale

Dell Technologies and KIOXIA have paired the KIOXIA LC9 series 245.76TB NVMe SSD with the Dell PowerEdge R7725 server running Dell ObjectScale software, creating a 2U storage node with 9.83PB of raw flash capacity.

This makes ObjectScale the first object storage platform to qualify KIOXIA’s 245.76TB drive, which KIOXIA introduced in July 2025 as the industry’s highest-capacity NVMe SSD.

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Dynatrace Acquires Arize: What the $915M Deal Means for AI Observability

Observability leader Dynatrace announced its intent to acquire Arize, a venture-backed company specializing in AI observability and large language model evaluation, for $915 million.

Arize provides a platform for evaluating and monitoring the behavior of large language models, AI agents, and machine learning systems in production, addressing issues such as hallucination detection, output quality measurement, and behavioral drift that fall outside the scope of conventional application performance monitoring.

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