Leave it to the CES consumer electronics show to wrest Silicon Valley from its holiday slumber, and chipmakers from Nvidia to Advanced Micro Devices to Qualcomm obliged.

It was all about enabling artificial intelligence at the desktop and that’s going to require serious hardware horsepower. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang even upgraded his usual leather jacket for the occasion.

Still, this year AI is likely to be all about the data — how to create and leverage it — so check out Tony Baer’s predictions for data in the coming year to see what’s coming.

It looks like money will keep flowing into AI in 2025, as Anthropic reportedly raised an additional $2 billion in a bid to cement its status among the AI front-runners. Lest you thought Google wouldn’t be one of those front-runners, it continues to make up for lost ground in AI with world model research, AI audio news summaries and AI agents for retail.

AI is also continuing to drive a data center boom, with Microsoft, AWS, private equity and more scrambling to build them.

But 2025 also will present more and more examples of how AI can be used for nefarious means: The Cybertruck bomber used ChatGPT to plan his attack. Was this AI’s social media moment?

Speaking of social media, Meta axes fact-checking in favor of community notes — which are months away at least. Tech’s titans aren’t just bowing to Trump. They’re showing their true colors.

Oops. Jensen Huang tanked quantum computing stocks after saying working quantum machines are up to 20 years away.

The consolidation of cybersecurity continues with at least four deals this past week. Maybe consolidation will extend to semiconductors as well, amid reports that SoftBank may buy Arm chipmaker Ampere.

CES: All AI all the time, with a side of chips

Silicon for the AI edge: Chipmakers in the spotlight at CES as hardware matters again

Roundup: Nvidia’s impressive list of new and upgraded products at CES

Nvidia debuts Project DIGITS, a palm-sized AI supercomputer that can sit on any desk

Nvidia launches new AI development tools for autonomous robots and vehicles

Qualcomm unveils Snapdragon X Platform, expanding affordable AI-powered PC options

Qualcomm unveils on-premises AI, IoT and smart home innovations at CES

Dell overhauls brand portfolio and adds NPU-equipped portables and desktops

Intel introduces new Core Ultra 200 laptop processors

AMD debuts AI-optimized laptop processor that can run large language models

AI and data: Data moves back into the limelight

Tony Baer’s annual must-read predictions for what comes next in all things data: Data 2025 outlook: AI drives a renaissance of data

Money matters

Anthropic reportedly raising up to $2B at $60B valuation

AI dominates global venture funding as other sectors faced challenges in Q4 And the U.S. is absolutely crushing it in AI funding.

Innovaccer nabs $275M to build out AI healthcare cloud

Hippocratic AI raises $141M to staff hospitals with clinical AI agents

Contentstack snaps up customer data startup Lytics to enhance content personalization

AMD invests $20M in AI-powered drug discovery company Absci

Decentralized payments startup Nevermined raises $4M to unlock AI-to-AI agent commerce

New models and services

Google’s DeepMind is recruiting AI researchers to advance world model development

Google’s new Search Labs experiment delivers daily audio news updates

Google Cloud expands retail offerings with AI agents and enhanced search experiences

Cohere introduces AI large language model-powered North productivity platform

Salesforce brings an AI-powered digital labor force to retailers

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt reportedly working on new AI video and social media startup

Diffbot boosts LLM accuracy by tapping into its vast Knowledge Graph of up-to-date information

Microsoft open-sources its Phi-4 small language model

Inflection point: ChatGPT was used to plan Las Vegas Cybertruck explosion

Razer enters AI market with new gaming assistant Project Ava

Code Intelligence’s new AI agent Spark works autonomously to find bugs in any codebase

KoderAI’s new multi-agent generative AI coding platform can build working apps and websites from scratch

Computer vision startup Ubicept helps AI systems to see in the dark

Flock Safety and MS2 try to reduce road fatalities with AI-powered traffic analytics

Human Security and TollBit partner to enhance AI scraping controls and monetization tools

Around the enterprise: AI fuels a data center explosion

Money matters

Microsoft reveals plan to spend $80B building AI data centers in fiscal 2025

AWS to invest at least $11B in new Georgia data centers

Trump announces Emirati businessman will invest $20B+ in US data centers

Digital Edge raises $1.6B to fund Asian data center expansion

Report: SoftBank and Arm could acquire server chip provider Ampere

Samsung forecasts Q4 profit miss amid struggle to supply Nvidia with AI chips

Getty announces plans to merge with Shutterstock in $3.7B deal

Private equity firm Cuadrilla Capital acquired network automation firm Gluware for an undisclosed amount

New products

Oracle touts speedy vector search in new Exadata machine

NXP introduces Arm-based MCX L chips for industrial devices

Linux Foundation launches initiative to support Chromium-based browsers

Cyber beat: Already the year of consolidation

Darktrace to acquire Cado Security to strengthen cloud forensic capabilities

1Password acquires Trelica to extend its cybersecurity capabilities

WatchGuard seeks to accelerate expansion into MDR market with ActZero acquisition

Veracode acquires assets from Phylum to bolster software supply chain security

New services

White House introduces US Cyber Trust Mark to help consumers identify secure IoT devices

Exabeam expands New-Scale platform with Open-API support and advanced threat detection

Synology launches ActiveProtect unified backup solution for enterprises

New PhishWP plugin harvests credit card data and OTPs from legitimate sites

Attacks & advice

How AI can supercharge security operations

Ivanti discloses critical VPN vulnerability being actively targeted by hackers

Green Bay Packers online store breach exposes credit card data of thousands of fans

Fortinet warns of sophisticated phishing campaign exploiting Microsoft 365 domains

Netskope finds enterprise phishing clicks nearly tripled over the past year

Elsewhere in tech: Meta bows to Trump again

Meta announces broad changes to fact-checking, content moderation policies The craven nature of this change as Trump gets ready to take office is obvious if only from the fact that Meta is axing the content moderation team months before launching the promised community notes. As Axios put it, “Under Meta’s newly relaxed moderation policies, women can be compared to household objects, ethnic groups can be called ‘filth,’ users can call for the exclusion of gay people from certain professions and people can refer to a transgender or non-binary person as an ‘it.’”

Nvidia’s Jensen Huang tanks quantum computing stocks after saying useful quantum machines are up to two decades off.

Billionaire Frank McCourt’s Project Liberty proposes bid for TikTok’s US assets

Judge rejects Google’s motion to dismiss privacy lawsuit, trial set for August

NXP snaps up TTTech Auto for $625M to accelerate autonomous vehicle safety

Xocean raises $119M to expand ocean data platform

On the blockchain

Movement Labs layer 2 Ethereum blockchain reportedly seeks $100M raise at $3B valuation

Story, Stability AI collaborate to help creators make money from their work in the AI ecosystem

Gemini crypto exchange agrees to pay $5M settlement to CFTC

Comings and goings, and a passing

Tenable Chairman and CEO Amit Yoran died unexpectedly Jan. 3 after a battle with cancer.

Francis deSouza is Google Cloud’s new chief operating officer. He co-founded AI research startup Synth Labs last year after numerous stints at Symantec, Illumina and others (per CRN).

Salesforce moves Slack Chief Revenue Officer Kaylin Voss over to be EVP of Agentforce and Data Cloud. 

Wiz appoints former Tanium co-CEO Fazal Merchant president and chief financial officer.

Starburst appoints former Pluralsight and Snowflake vet Lisa Luscap chief marketing officer.

Microsoft plans a round of performance-based layoffs, reportedly about 1% of its staff, meaning several thousand given that about 228,000 people work there (per Geekwire).

Citrix parent Cloud Software Group confirms layoffs (per CRN).

What’s next

Jan. 14-15: Cyber Resiliency Summit, a Super Studio event from theCUBE.

Image: SiliconANGLE/Google Imagen 2