theCUBE Pod: AI agents reshape enterprise systems as CoreWeave rides GPU scarcity

Furrier said the semiconductor industry has shifted from the GPU era to the systems era. Sovereign AI efforts in countries such as France and Canada are not only about keeping data centers within national borders, he said. Quoting Nvidia Corp. CEO Jensen Huang’s description of the AI factory, Furrier said the factory produces not just tokens and revenue but intelligence.

Ahead of CoreWeave’s Fully Connected event, the analysts examined the company’s prospects. CoreWeave has completed the industry’s first bring-up and validation of Nvidia’s Vera Rubin NVL72 system, but questions remain about whether its financing is sustainable. Vellante said Dell Inc. is getting a massive return on its best AI investments, while mainstream enterprises are not. He said CoreWeave disclosed that 70% of its customers or revenue came from its top three customers, and he speculated that those customers are OpenAI PBC, Microsoft Corp. and Meta. Those companies will spend heavily with CoreWeave and can monetize the work, Vellante said, but he questioned whether end customers can do the same.

Vellante noted that the market has typically been deflationary, with technology becoming cheaper over time, but is currently inflationary. That means CoreWeave is being kept afloat by GPU scarcity. Its long-term success will depend on expanding its portfolio the way Amazon Web Services did, he said. Furrier was more optimistic. He said the model is not disappearing in the cloud but is being disaggregated. Hybrid cloud is essentially distributed computing, now with distributed hyperscale capabilities, he said. Neoclouds represent a new infrastructure layer and a customer specialty; they are called neoclouds today and will be AI clouds tomorrow, according to Furrier.

Dell’s earnings continue to be strong, reflecting the opportunity for infrastructure companies in the growing AI industry. Software-as-a-service companies, by contrast, continue to provoke concern. Salesforce Inc. is now closely tied to the AI giants. Some observers think that could be a death knell, while others see it as necessary for SaaS survival. Vellante said infrastructure is the place to be and that the opportunity is no longer just about chips but about the system and the value chain across it. He asked when the shift will hit software, noting that software has had a bounce back and asking whether it is a dead cat bounce before the real SaaSpocalypse. Many people think Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff letting Anthropic in is letting the fox into the henhouse, he said.

Meta Platforms Inc. recently introduced its new agent, Muse, which can automate digital tasks while living inside a secure cloud environment. Given Facebook’s past data privacy scandals, Vellante has doubts about it. Furrier instead praised a different AI agent: Instinct, an invite-only AI assistant that has gone viral among Silicon Valley insiders. Furrier said users have to give Instinct credentials and that it is less secure than Google Workspace. There is some trust involved, he said, but it performs many useful tasks and acts essentially as a chief of staff. A user could give it credentials to travel apps such as United and Delta and ask it to log in on their behalf to find an aisle seat, he said, and it stays on the task while the user does other things.

Amid concerns about the traditional SaaS industry, Furrier sees potential for tech products to be “100% secure” by design. Vellante is skeptical that this will happen anytime soon, if ever. The podcast also noted that agents linked to OpenAI reportedly attempted to brute-force a United Nations statistics site and that an OpenAI agent gained unauthorized access to an Australian government website. According to the discussion, there appears to be a long way to go before AI can be fully reined in.