• CoreWeave’s IPO was the first time an AI startup went public since the beginning of the generative AI (GenAI) boom.
• The IPO market has been very slow against the backdrop of an increasingly volatile geopolitical environment.
The data center operator CoreWeave made headlines as it went public last week. Its IPO, initially estimated to reach up to $32 billion, went down to $23 billion in the days prior to its stock market debut. CoreWeave rents out computing power to big tech companies building out large language models (LLMs). The company relies heavily on two major customers: Microsoft and OpenAI. The latter, alongside Nvidia, is a stakeholder in CoreWeave.
• NVIDIA believes enterprises are evolving from digital transformation driven by large language models (LLMs), and towards physical AI, or spatial AI, and multimodal AI.
• The industry at large is turning to “reasoning” models, capable of offering more analysis and autonomy than LLMs, especially combined with AI agents.
GTC is NVIDIA’s most important conference, focused on developers, who are the core of the AI market. This year, the event was held on March 17-21 in San Jose, California (US). NVIDIA believes that enterprises should be diversifying from purely digital transformation driven by LLMs, and towards physical AI or spatial AI, as well as multimodal AI, robotics, and AI at the edge. For this reason, the event tilted towards the industrial, automotive, and manufacturing sectors. The industry at large is turning to “reasoning” models, capable of offering more analysis and autonomy than LLMs, especially combined with AI agents. This transition should bring further demand for raw computing power, despite efficiency gains in terms of chipset architectures.
DeepSeek-R1 Distill Llama and Qwen models became available in Amazon Bedrock Marketplace and Amazon SageMaker JumpStart in February 2025.
DeepSeek-R1 became available as a fully managed, generally available, serverless model in Amazon Bedrock on March 10, 2025.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) just became the first cloud computing provider to offer DeepSeek-R1 as a fully managed, serverless large language model (LLM) in general availability on Amazon Bedrock, a service that provides access to third-party foundation models. The publicly available DeepSeek-R1 series has taken the generative AI (GenAI) market by storm, with its advanced reasoning capabilities and reduced computing costs, made possible thanks to an innovative architecture based on mixture of experts technologies.
• On February 4, 2025, the European Commission published the Guidelines on prohibited AI practices, as defined by the AI Act, which came into force on August 1, 2024.
• The AI Action Summit took place in Paris (France) on February 10/11, 2025, with heads of state and government, leaders of international organizations, and CEOs in attendance.
It has been a busy few weeks for observers of AI in the European continent: firstly, the issuance of new guidance around the AI Act, the most comprehensive regulatory framework for AI to date; secondly, the AI Action Summit, hosted by France and co-chaired by India. The stakes were high, with almost 100 countries and over 1,000 private sector and civil society representatives in attendance, and the ensuing debate delivered in spades. With the summit following the latest issuance of the AI Act by a matter of days, part of the event concentrated on issues around regulation vs innovation.
• Chinese startup DeepSeek had released an open-weight model, DeepSeek-R1, with similar capabilities to many of the leading generative AI (GenAI) models available in the market, at a fraction of the cost.
• Like OpenAI o1, R1 is a “reasoning” model. These models produce responses incrementally, simulating a process similar to the way humans reason through problems.
Another week, another AI revelation. The news that Chinese startup DeepSeek had released an open-weight model, DeepSeek-R1, with similar capabilities to OpenAI o1, sent shockwaves through Silicon Valley (and Wall Street) just as the new US administration was inaugurated, with a display of big tech billionaires in attendance. A delicious irony, then, that while inauguration week was capped off with headlines surrounding the muscular Stargate project, a $500 billion initiative to fund AI infrastructure, the quiet (initially) release of DeepSeek-R1 would eventually steal that thunder.
• Telefónica Tech held its analyst event in London, UK, on November 28, 2024.
• The company has created a new operating model designed to replicate its local capabilities at a global scale.
GlobalData attended Telefónica Tech’s analyst day in London, UK, on November 28, 2024. The company recently reached the milestone of EUR2 billion in revenue, having evolved from a communications player later delivering traditional IT, to the cloud, implementing IoT solutions, and then moving on to AI projects. 2024 has been a momentous year for the company, which celebrated its centenary since it started out in 1924.
• Google Cloud held its first annual summit at the Tobacco Docks in East London (England) in October 2024.
• Announcements included Google’s expanded data residency to help customers undertake Gemini 1.5 Flash ML processing and data storage entirely in the UK, if they handle sensitive data that cannot leave the country.
Google Cloud held its first annual summit at the Tobacco Docks in East London (England) in October 2024. The event included keynotes, workshops, demos, and the prominent presence of an exciting ecosystem of startups, driven by the launch of the Google Cloud Startup Hub, a new community space for developers and entrepreneurs.
• OpenAI’s latest fundraising round puts it at a $150 billion valuation.
• The startup recently released the OpenAI o1 platform, designed to solve complex tasks in science, coding, and math.
The world’s most high-profile technology startup has been in the news again, this time because of a new funding round that has increased its valuation to $150 billion. Microsoft, SoftBank, and Nvidia joined the fundraising alongside Thrive Capital and Khosla Ventures. MGX, the Abu Dhabi (the UAE) investment firm that has also been in the news lately thanks to its investment in data centers (please see: Microsoft Joins BlackRock in $100-billion Investment Drive to Fund Data Center Infrastructure Projects, September 20, 2024) also contributed.
• BlackRock is launching the investment vehicle with its new infrastructure unit, Global Infrastructure Partners.
• Microsoft and MGX, the investment company backed by Abu Dhabi (UAE), are general partners in the fund. Nvidia will act as an advisor, focusing on factory design.
Data center infrastructure stands at the crux of the generative AI (genAI) revolution: without bricks and mortar, without chips, without servers and networking gear, there would be no genAI bots. The power-hungry algorithms that feed Chat-GPT and other familiar platforms require vast amounts of hardware as well as lots of energy. The International Energy Agency (IEA) forecasts electricity consumption by data centers from workloads such as AI will surpass 1,000 terawatt-hours by 2026, more than twice the amount – 460 terawatt-hours (TWh) – used in 2022.
• Salesforce is leveraging generative AI (GenAI) capabilities to address customer pain points such as processing unstructured data and unlocking the value in this data creating unified customer profiles.
• Salesforce Data Cloud will be available on Hyperforce in the UK in July 2024. Salesforce Hyperforce aims to address customers’ growing appetite for compliance, safety, and standardization in the public cloud.
The Salesforce World Tour took place on June 6, 2024, at the Excel Centre in East London (England), with sponsors such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Cognizant, Deloitte, and PWC. The annual event included workshops, demos, and discussions with partners, the announcement of an AI center, and innovations in the Salesforce Data Cloud and Slack platforms. For GenAI observers, the most salient news was the general availability of Salesforce Data Cloud Vector Database, built into the Salesforce Einstein 1 Platform, which infuses GenAI into the vendor’s CRM platform, Salesforce Customer 360. The vector database collects, “ingests,” and combines structured and unstructured data regarding end users. This is of great importance to Salesforce’s customers’ customers. According to the vendor, around 80% of customer data is scattered across internal corporate departments in an unstructured configuration, “trapped” in PDFs, emails, chat conversations, transcripts, customer reviews, and so on. This data can be leveraged to create a closer overall relationship with the customer by creating a unified profile of the so-called customer journey. Being able to ground all types of data in Salesforce Data Cloud – where it is processed – unlocks a ton of valuable information and not just to engage with the customer in positive ways: It makes it possible to be agile as possible in case of problems including issues such as product recall, returns, and so on.
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