TikTok returned early this week after a short pause thanks to newly minted President Trump, but it was his other executive orders on AI and crypto that are likely to roil the business world.

Meanwhile, Trump’s memecoins and loosening of crypto rules provide a way to funnel money to him while he’s president: corruption in broad daylight. Not to mention he pardoned the founder of the drug site Silk Road and 1,500 convicted Jan. 6 rioters. And ordered the end of birthright citizenship. And the U.S. is leaving the World Health Organization, just as an avian flu epidemic is raging — so much for bringing down those egg prices. We’re only a week into the new regime. Lord help us.

OpenAI debuted its Operator agent system. It’s just a research preview for now, a start toward the promised land of AI agents where we might see automated grocery restocking and expense reports (I’ll believe that when I see it). But the road will be long and winding.

Huge AI and data fundings keep happening in the new year with no slowdown in sight, and this week is was Databricks’ and Anthropic‘s turn.

Big spending on data centers also continued this week to support all that AI training and inference, in particular the Stargate joint venture with OpenAI — of course — Oracle and Softbank, though it appears much less than meets the eye for now. Even some of it, though, along with many other efforts such as ByteDance’s, plus Meta’s plans to spend as much as $65 billion this year on capital spending, including a mega data center, suggest a potential data-center bubble.

Don’t miss this week’s Breaking Analysis from Dave Vellante and the Data Gang, who put out their 2025 predictions for data and AI.

Antitrust activity continues apace across the pond, even as the new administration here seems likely to deemphasize it.

Fourth-quarter earning season kicks off in earnest next week with SAP, IBM, Microsoft, ServiceNow, Meta, Tesla, Intel, Apple, Samsung and more.

You can hear more about this and other news on John Furrier’s and Dave Vellante’s weekly podcast theCUBE Pod, out now on YouTube. Here’s all the enterprise news that fit this week:

AI and data: What’s coming in 2025

Headline news and analysis

Breaking Analysis: Predictions 2025: Data renaissance, systems of agency, LAMs, SAMs and security threats

OpenAI releases Operator agent as rivals enhance their AI services It looks promising to some but is hardly the seamless agentic AI everyone’s hoping for, if indeed that can be achieved for a broad enough array of tasks, and at large scale. That’s very far from certain at this point.

OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank to invest $500B in US AI infrastructure building project Given previous announcements, such as Oracle’s — and even Stargate itself, which almost everyone seems to have forgotten — most or all of this is already underway or planned. It also might be only for OpenAI. And even then, full funding apparently hasn’t been secured yet, and the government won’t be providing any.

Moreover, as Runtime’s Tom Krazit noted, this is so huge that it dwarfs what all the cloud providers are doing — struggling to do because of power considerations. Indeed, KPMG U.S. Technology, Media & Telecommunications Consulting Leader Chad Seiler told SiliconANGLE in an email, “Without access to reliable energy, hyperscalers simply cannot scale the AI capabilities that will drive innovation and further economic growth.”

And besides adequate power, AI’s other, perhaps even more important, gating factor right now is data availability. All of which suggests a looming data center bubble if all those AI hopes don’t pan out. Lightspeed Venture Partners venture capitalist Jeremy Liew summed up the potential problem in an X post, referencing new, cheaper AI training models such as China’s DeepSeek: “If the training costs for the new DeepSeek models are even close to correct, it feels like Stargate might be getting ready to fight the last war. Like bringing an M1 Abrams MBT to a drone fight.”

Iceberg project leader is bullish on prospects for unified tables and catalogs

Trump signs new executive order on AI development, overturning Biden-era restrictions

CEOs confront AI challenges: Cisco event captures perils and opportunities

Meta Chief Scientist Yann LeCun says large language models will run out of steam within five years, as world models come to the fore.

Money matters

TikTok’s owner joins the AI party too: Report: ByteDance sets aside about $20B for AI spending this year

And Facebook now plans to up capital spending on AI and a mega data center this year to as much as $65 billion.

Databricks completes $10B funding round, raises $5.25B in debt

Google reportedly invests $1B+ in OpenAI rival Anthropic

Mistral AI plans IPO (per Bloomberg)

Sam Altman-backed Retro Biosciences to raise $1B for project to extend human life

AI text-to-code startup StackBlitz in talks for $700M valuation (per Bloomberg)

Eleos gets $60M in funding to transform behavioral healthcare with AI agents

AI-powered robotics startup Sereact raises €25 million

Delivery management platform Package.ai raises $14M for ‘Uber-like’ customer experience

Palona AI gets $10M to build more reliable customer service chatbots that don’t make mistakes

New services

Google bids for multimodal AI leadership

Galileo unleashes platform for evaluating AI agents

Hugging Face open-sources world’s smallest vision language model

API collaboration startup Postman wants to lead the charge in AI agent development

DigitalOcean dives into agentic AI creation, making it accessible to every developer

TigerGraph revs up its graph database offering with faster setup times and new preconfigurations

WebAI’s Companion is an AI assistant for enterprise employees that runs privately on their own devices

Perplexity launches Sonar API for building applications with search capabilities

DeepSeek open-sources its R1 reasoning model series

Diesel Labs blends generative AI chat with big-data analysis to create synthetic focus groups for marketing teams

Qdrant launches hardware-independent, GPU-accelerated vector indexing capability

Nebius AI Studio adds its first text-to-image models to support creative app development

There’s even more AI and big data news on SiliconANGLE

Around the enterprise: UK antitrust hawks keep targeting US tech giants

CMA opens investigations into Apple and Google over mobile practices

New products and services

Transformation in billing: Metronome offers usage-based tech for the AI era

Samsung debuts new Galaxy S25 smartphone series with Google’s Gemini AI assistant

Google announces new Chrome Web Store for enterprise browser extension control

Google announces new educational features for Chromebooks and Workspace

CubeFS storage platform graduates from CNCF incubation

Money matters

Gartner sees 10% IT spending jump in 2025, but don’t get too excited

Render Services raises $80M to try to make AWS and other cloud infrastructure platforms obsolete

Baya Systems raises $36M to transform AI chiplet design

Twilio stock surges after company issues optimistic 2027 profit forecast

SK Hynix posts record quarterly profit, surpassing Samsung on AI boom

Texas Instruments earnings fall short, stock drops

Seagate stock rises 4% on earnings beat

We have more news on cloud, infrastructure and apps

Cyber beat: Using ChatGPT for attacks

Prioritizing AppDev resilience in 2025: Insights from theCUBE Research

Attack & response

ChatGPT API vulnerability could enable large-scale DDoS attacks, security researcher warns

HPE investigating potential breach after hacker claims to steal data

Payment fraud risks increase as cybercriminals exploit e-skimming and scam e-commerce

SentinelOne report highlights shared tactics between HellCat and Morpheus ransomware groups

New Mirai variant ‘Murdoc_Botnet’ targets AVTECH cameras and Huawei routers

Money matters

Google joins forces with HTC Vive to boost Android XR Development

Citrix acquires thin-client provider Unicon to strength endpoint management and security

Mitiga secures $30M to expand cloud and SaaS incident response capabilities

Hypori raises $12M to expand security virtual mobile access platform

DryRun Security raises $8.7M to advance AI-driven application security

Passbolt raises $8M to modernize password and credential access management

More cybersecurity news here

Elsewhere in tech: TikTok lives… for now

Trump suspends TikTok ban, signs tech-focused executive orders

TikTok restores US service following intervention from President-elect Trump

In challenge to TikTok, Bluesky and X roll out dedicated vertical video feeds

Trump signs executive order to prevent censorship of online platforms

Meta reportedly developing Oakley smart glasses and high-end devices

Trump pardons Ross Ulbricht, founder of Silk Road drug marketplace

Stablecoin issuer Circle buys Hashnote crypto money-market fund manager

And check out more news on emerging tech, blockchain and crypto and policy

Comings and goings

Former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger reinvents himself as an angel investor in AI startup Fractile (per CTech)

Chris Young, EVP of business development at Microsoft, has stepped down for a “new endeavor” (per GeekWire)

AI value chain services firm Invisible Technologies picked McKinsey AI leader Matthew Fitzpatrick as its CEO.

Abnormal Security hired ex-ServiceNow SVP of Finance Lisa Banks as CFO as company starts prepping for IPO (per CNBC)

Cribl, which provides a data processing engine for IT and security, appointed Mike Pyle chief revenue officer as it passes $200 million in annual recurring revenue.

What’s next

Big earnings week as the fourth-quarter season begins in earnest:

Monday, Jan. 27: SAP

Tuesday, Jan. 28: Commvault, F5 Networks

Wednesday, Jan. 29: IBM, Microsoft, ServiceNow, Meta, Tesla, Extreme Networks, Western Digital, ASML

Thursday, Jan. 30: Intel, Apple, Samsung, Mobileye, NetScout, Dynatrace, Check Point Software, Atlassian

Image: SiliconANGLE/Ideogram