Cloud Technology News of the Month: November 2023

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TL;DR

• How tech execs are planning to pay the massive gen AI bills 💸
• Egress fees under investigation from UK’s CMA 🔎
• New AI chips on the horizon 🤖

Keep reading to find out what happened in the cloud over the last month.

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Story of the Month

Where Do You Find The Money For Gen AI?

Everyone now wants to get their hands on gen AI. 

But how do managers find the money, especially since gen AI budgets can be 3.4x larger than anticipated?

A third of them plan to raid other portions of their IT portfolio like traditional cloud computing. 

The impact of gen AI on both labor and cloud spending will be far-reaching, with massive budgets allocated to finding, training, and retaining the right people to implement your generative AI systems. 

This makes FinOps capabilities indispensable to companies right now. 

Before cutting back on projects, it’s essential that you get real-time cost visibility into all AI, hybrid cloud, and application modernization efforts and optimize the spend at every step of the way using automation. 

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The Cloud in Numbers

Hyperscalers In Competition

$56.5 billion – Microsoft’s revenue in the fiscal first quarter, noting the strongest sales increase in six quarters (13%).

$8.41 billion – Google Cloud revenue in Q3, a miss compared to the expected $8.64 billion, raising investor fears that the business risks slipping further behind its competitors.

$3.2 billion – this is how much Microsoft will invest in Australia to expand its cloud and AI infrastructure over the next two years.

30-50% – this is by how much the use of gen AI is cutting down on cloud migration efforts, according to a McKinsey partner.

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The Business of Cloud

Chip Stories and Egress Fees Under Investigation

To deal with the chip shortage, OpenAI is exploring making its own AI chips and has gone as far as evaluating a potential acquisition target. Link

Meanwhile, Qualcomm released a high-end PC ARM processor in response to Apple’s M-series ARM CPUs for the Mac: the Snapdragon X Elite, which claims to double the performance of some of AMD and Intel’s most popular 13th-generation Core CPUs. Link

The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) will launch a market investigation into cloud services and the hyperscaler cloud market share – and egress fees are one of the items! Link

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Security & Outages

A New Cloud For Europe

AWS is introducing AWS European Sovereign Cloud, an independent cloud service for Europe that will provide customers in highly regulated industries and the public sector with flexibility in meeting increasing data residency and resilience requirements in the EU. Link

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This series explores the most attention-grabbing cloud technology news, bringing you up to speed with the latest releases, acquisitions, research, and hidden gems in cloud computing – the stuff actually worth reading.