Cloud Wars Live with Bob Evans

In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I explore the growing security threats facing AI agents and why Microsoft is investing in protecting organizations from emerging attacks.
Highlights
00:25 — All these different breaches [are] happening in the space of agents ... because there's an opportunity here for people to be able to consume and utilize tokens from other providers. It's going to be a situation where we've got to keep an eye on this now.
00:44 — One of the most recent intrusions was a CERT India firm, and they didn't see any of the actual issues come in from the breach that they recently had. And this is very interesting because who then reported it? How do we know that there was a breach? The answer is that the actual providers of the different platforms are actually seeing these breaches, not the actual people being breached.
01:33 — So. what we are seeing is companies like Microsoft, with their Defender, can now pick up 60 different agent types that might be doing something nefarious within organizations. So, what we're going to see is a general view across this that we need a way to be able to secure and make sure that people are not actually getting access to information they shouldn't through agent-based technology.
02:00 — Now, even the Microsoft security chief had said that frontier models cannot be trusted. Now, does this mean that we can't trust the AI model to do something or not to do something? It's more along the lines that these models will want to solve a problem, so they will go and they will try to figure out a way to solve the problem.
03:26 — Two goals: one is make sure that we don't see any breaches happening, and number two is that we also want to make sure that we don't see people attacking for denial-of-service attacks or trying to take on and use AI credits from another organization. And I will leave you with this: Satya Nadella himself said, "We simply can't outsource responsibility for what intelligence does on our behalf," and that's very true.

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In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I analyze Microsoft’s ambitious Maia 300 rollout and how owning its own AI chips could give the company greater control over its AI infrastructure, improve efficiency, and reduce its reliance on NVIDIA.
Highlights
00:10 — Microsoft has announced Maia 300, the company's latest custom AI chip. It's also revealed plans to expand its Azure Maia systems to multi-gigawatt deployments starting in 2027, and with this rollout, Maia will become the primary AI inference system for Microsoft products and services.
01:02 — Microsoft expects Maia 300 to deliver 40% more tokens per megawatt than leading GPU-based systems. In other words, Microsoft expects to deliver more AI output for the same amount of power. That's crucial as demand for AI services continues to skyrocket. Now, Microsoft also says that in a full configuration, Maia 300 systems are expected to deliver up to seven times the rack-scale token throughput of Maia 200.
01:41 — Bear in mind that Maia 200 is already a very capable system, and Maia 300 really builds on those foundations — I'm going to quote Microsoft here: "To enable more coding with GitHub, more flexible AI model deployment through Microsoft Foundry, and faster interactions with Copilot, Teams, and Dragon Copilot." Now, back to that incredibly important point I made at the start.
02:05 — Maia is set to become the primary AI inference system for Microsoft products and services. Now, back in August, I talked about what this could mean for NVIDIA. My conclusion was that Microsoft's own chips could help level the playing field and give the company more options.
02:33 — Could Microsoft chips potentially challenge NVIDIA in the market? I think that remains to be seen. Microsoft's announcement certainly seems to suggest that it will have more control over its AI infrastructure, but it doesn't necessarily mean that NVIDIA is being pushed out of the picture altogether. What is clear, though, is that Microsoft is moving towards a much more full-circle AI business with its own chips, cloud infrastructure, models, and applications.

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In today’s Cloud Wars AI Minute, I break down Nscale’s rapid shift from Bitcoin mining to AI data centers and why its enormous contracted backlog raises important questions about the risks and realities of scaling AI infrastructure.
Highlights
0:05 — So, one of the things that I wanted to bring up, because as I was doing my research, I ran across Nscale. Now, Nscale is probably the biggest company that none of you even know who they are, and it's basically a data center hyperscaler.
1:48 — So, this company that literally has $103.4 billion in the ability for them to go and contract is only making $140.6 million as of H1 2026 revenue. So, that means they're way off of their revenue targets against what they're actually having to invest. If you take like 85% of what this company is funded by, it's funded by Anthropic, which is about $44.6 billion, and Microsoft at $43.88 billion, and that's primarily the workloads that they have, and that's why their H1 net loss is about $1.02 billion.
3:03 — And they've got these hardware contracts to be able to go do it. But those contracts need hardware, and so it's really interesting to see all the movement in this space. Because is this company overleveraged? We're not quite sure.
3:21 — In the last 24 hours, we saw Microsoft walk away from a contract, and then Anthropic doubling down on a contract with this particular vendor. So, it's going to become very interesting to see what happens as we watch this market expand, as the demand for data center capacity continues to grow, and companies like Nscale have the ability to sign these really big deals and these big contracts.

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In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I discuss why Oracle must continue delivering innovation and financial growth while reassuring investors about its debt and Larry Ellison's leadership presence.
Highlights
00:15 — On the one hand, Oracle has got this incredible momentum in its cloud and AI business, and a staggering volume of RPO backlog, but at the same time, there's lingering and ongoing concern about the level of debt that Oracle has had to take on in order to fund the buildout of these AI data centers across the country and around the world.
00:49 — It's got to continue its innovation blitz across all the things it's doing in OCI, with its AI database, its Fusion Agentic applications, and across the full Oracle product lineup. And we'll see that this week at AI World. Now, also, the momentum it's got from its Q1, which ended August 31st: it had OCI revenue up 121% to $7.4 billion, and the guidance for that is very strong going forward.
01:51 — That's not revenue yet, so that's one of the largest backlogs any company's ever had. Microsoft's right now is $678 billion, so just slightly larger than Oracle's. But very few companies have ever had to face a backlog like this and the responsibility to build that out.
02:42 — What Oracle has to do is continue to show product innovation and financial growth. It'll be having a financial analyst meeting later this week at AI World, so we'll see what comes out of that. Now, the other big point here with AI World is: Will Larry Ellison be there? And if so, in what capacity, and what level of visibility will he have?
03:09 —In early September, for the first time ever, Ellison was not present at all on the [earnings] call. He didn't make any statement. He didn't answer any questions. Oracle went public in 1986, and until recently, Ellison was not only on, but he was the heart of those earnings calls, those engagements with the public. He used those to give Oracle's vision of the future and where Oracle was headed, where the technology was headed.

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In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I examine how SAP's AI-first strategy helped drive 26% cloud revenue growth and why Christian Klein believes the momentum is accelerating.
Highlights
00:01 — We had some interesting numbers from SAP last week that I talked about: Q3 cloud revenue up 26% to seven and a half billion, and its cloud backlog up 28% to $27 billion. I wanted to chat a little bit today about Christian Klein, the SAP CEO. He said there are three reasons why AI has been so important in helping to generate these sorts of numbers.
00:37 — Here's what he said: There's certainly better technology capable now with AI to help accelerate these migrations, but the big thing, he said, is getting better business outcomes and being able to focus on those. The second thing he said: AI and the enhancements there make the suite, the SAP Business Suite, relative to best-of-breed. He said it makes it much more attractive.
01:12 — And he said the Business AI platform overall has been a huge driver for customers, and especially in this area now around the Business Data Cloud. He said that is the thorny issue that's going to unleash the potential for AI to come in and really help drive these better business outcomes.
02:28 — One of the reasons, I think, is because SAP has been not only going all in on AI for the last few years, but in addition to that, I think Klein has always kept uppermost in his mind: What are the outcomes that are most important for our customers? The business outcomes most important for them, and are we putting the right amount of emphasis on helping deliver those?
03:04 — The important thing here about that is that the Business Data Cloud is unifying all this stuff that SAP has been putting together over the last five decades. How companies work, where their data is, what their processes are like, the industry-specific nature of what they have, and I think this Business Data Cloud, with the various ideas that Klein put forward, I think that's going to be the most important.

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