Midterm elections will put AI and data centers on trial, but Big Tech may end up winning anyway

It may be a little soon to determine the ultimate winners and losers among enterprise suppliers after the midterm elections, but the early line is: Big Tech wins and data center suppliers operators such as chipmakers and neoclouds lose. Or will everybody lose?

The day after the elections, stocks of many tech companies shot up, a bit paradoxically because investors apparently believe potential limits on AI and data centers could tamp down spending on compute and thus improve tech company margins that have made investors nervous. But then on Thursday, tech stocks almost across the board plunged back down even more for a collective loss of $2.5 trillion in market cap — the Nasdaq fell more than 5.5% — on more generalized worries that, well, the AI boom could slow. Suffice to say, investors are still sorting things out.

Marvell Semiconductor this week made a surprisingly huge acquisition with Lumentum, a bet on the AI boom continuing. That is, if it comes off: The drop in Lumentum’s stock price has some speculating it could hunt around for another offer.

And the AI boom indeed continues apace, judging from strong tech earnings, though even pre-election, they reflected investor wariness. AMD, Supermicro and Arista all beat easily, as well as Palantir and Kyndryl, whose stock rocketed 30%. But chipmakers Qualcomm, Arm and Globalfoundries didn’t get the love despite good quarters — especially in Thursday’s bloodbath.

All of which raises the question that Dave Vellante posed in his Breaking Analysis last weekend: Can enterprise AI pay for the boom? Dave and analyst Crawford Del Prete discussed the prospects.

Next week’s earnings reports include Cisco, CoreWeave, Applied Materials, Cerebras and Nebius, any or all of which could move markets.

Here’s all of this week’s enterprise and emerging tech news, analysis and commentary from SiliconANGLE and beyond:

Analysis, opinion and food for thought

Amazon, Microsoft and other tech giants close higher after Democrats’ midterm sweep No, data centers won’t get shut down, and AI will continue apace — just regulated as it needs to be, and we can hope it’s in the right way to protect people and communities and innovation all at the same time. We can walk and chew gum at the same time if we put our mind to it. Hard to imagine the Dems could do worse than Trump and the GOP have been doing for years now.

OpenAI makes new data center commitments, AI policy recommendations That was quick; we’ll see if it makes a difference.

ICYMI last weekend, even enterprises buying all this AI have been doubtful about all this spending: Breaking Analysis: Can enterprise AI pay for the boom?

AI and data: Anthropic’s pre-IPO slowdown

Money matters

Trajectory raises $45M to make AI model training accessible to nontechnical experts

Policy

New models and services

New benchmark from SemiAnalysis: GDPx: Measuring frontier model capabilities across the most valuable domains

Around the enterprise: Marvell sees the light

Money matters

Key earnings:

Supermicro and Arista Networks crush expectations as AI infrastructure wins again And Zeus Kerravala’s Arista analysis: Arista’s record quarter shows the network has become central to AI

Check Point Software shares fall as revenue misses expectations despite in-line earnings

Dynatrace beat Q2 forecasts, then spooked investors with guidance

DigitalOcean tops Q3 2026 estimates, lifts outlook

Astera Labs tops Q3 estimates, issues strong guidance, shares slide

Uber beats on revenue, CEO says it’s ‘investing significantly’ to add drivers

USDC stablecoin backer Circle Internet Group cut about 5% of its workforce despite higher revenue and earnings beat

Figma sinks after earnings beat as company prioritizes long-term growth with AI changes

New products and services

VMware gets simpler AI deployment and low-cost version for basic private clouds

Cyber beat: CrowdStrike strikes again

Money matters

Palo Alto Networks in talks to buy AI agent security startup Clutch for $500M (per TechCrunch)

New services

Attack & response

Elsewhere in tech: Team quantum

Comings and goings

HP tapped former GSK executive Emma Walmsley as its next CEO.

OpenAI named former U.S. Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll senior counselor for national security modernization.

Cat Wu joined OpenAI from Anthropic in huge product-lead coup (per Business Insider)

Uber’s Jill Hazelbaker will join OpenAI as chief corporate affairs officer.

Bahadir Onalan returned to Microsoft as a VP in CoreAI and Responsible AI after almost 10 years at Amazon.

Fleet management firm Netradyne appointed former Encora exec Melissa Ribeiro chief people officer and Brion O’Connor, most recently at EvenUp, chief marketing officer.

Canva is laying off 1,271 people, or 22% of its staff, as it merges its product, growth and platform teams.

SUSE to cut one in 10 employees because of… AI (per The Register).

What’s next

Events

Nov. 9-12: KubeCon North America, Salt Lake City: TheCUBE and theCUBE Research will be onsite for interviews and analysis and SiliconANGLE will have the news.

Nov. 9-12: Web Summit, Barcelona.

Earnings

Monday, Nov. 9: Monday.com, Qualys, Rackspace

Tuesday, Nov. 10: CoreWeave, D-Wave Quantum, Rigetti

Thursday, Nov. 12: Cisco, Applied Materials, Cerebras, Nebius, Gemini Space Station

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