Craig Matsumoto

4 days ago | futuriom.com | Craig Matsumoto

Alternative public cloud Vultr long prided itself on raising no outside funding. That came to a dead stop thanks to the rise of AI. Last year, Vultr raised $333 million from investors including AMD. This week, it's added a $329 million credit facility backed by huge banks: J.P. Morgan, Bank of America and Wells Fargo led the deal; other participants included Citi, Goldman Sachs and KeyBank. Those moves show how quickly Vultr's ambitions rose in light of the AI opportunity.

1 week ago | futuriom.com | Craig Matsumoto

Data is the lifeblood of AI. In more practical terms, that means AI is forcing enterprises and vendors to rethink how data is handled. That's why Databricks and Snowflake both had to announce new databases last week — both powered by acquisition rather than internal tweaking. It's an acknowledgement that AI requires a level of agility and just-in-time service that neither platform was designed to deliver. It's all part of a new data pipeline that both companies are now fighting to dominate.

2 weeks ago | futuriom.com | Craig Matsumoto

CoreWeave (Nasdaq: CRWV) and Nebius (Nasdaq: NBIS) are now publicly traded, which makes them default proxies for gauging the financial state of the neoclouds, as the market for cloud providers targeting GPU-as-a-service has become known. Their stock prices also let us glimpse public sentiment, which has gone sky-high since CoreWeave went public at the end of March.

3 weeks ago | futuriom.com | Craig Matsumoto

Popularity of the Model Context Protocol (MCP) has developers dreaming about a future where AI bots go whizzing about the Internet collecting data and completing tasks, all in automated fashion. We're not there yet. But the work to prepare for that future is well underway, judging by the enthusiasm at the MCP Developers Summit. The grassroots conference gathered 300 developers in San Francisco.

1 month ago | futuriom.com | Craig Matsumoto

The longer that data and storage platform VAST Data is around, the more appropriate the name seems. In 2023, the company revealed the data platform it had been envisioning since inception. This week, VAST has become even more vast, describing how its architecture is set to become a complete data pipeline for agentic AI. "The operating system for the thinking machine" is the company's new tagline.