Cloud, Compiled (Issue 121)

Just me or did it feel like kind of a big week in cloud? Here are a few highlights in case you missed the goings-on:

• Oracle made waves “doing the near impossible” as IDC’s Dave McCarthy described Big Red’s multicloud announcement with Amazon.

• Wired went deep on Apple’s private cloud architecture.

• Akamai said its Project Cirrus initiative of putting Akamai’s business on Akamai’s cloud reduced its hyperscale spend by 40% in its first year, with a projected 70% savings in year two.

• The U.S. Department of Commerce proposed new requirements for AI developers and cloud providers designed to “safeguard against potential abuses that could undermine global security and stability.”

• Americans used a record 100 trillion megabytes of wireless data in 2023, according to a study released by the wireless industry association CTIA. In case you were wondering why there’s so much excitement at the edge.

• Amazon said it is investing $10.5 billion to expand its UK cloud business. Which is timely, given data centers in the UK are set to be designated as critical national infrastructure.

• Over at the Futurum Group, Dion Hinchcliffe says IT budgets are expected to see a 5.5% increase in next year as CIOs invest in more modern AI platforms that can support AI workloads across various environments.

• In that same vein, Akamai’s Ari Weil wrote a piece for LinkedIn calling attention to why demand for lightweight, edge-based compute resources will grow as enterprises move away from in-house model training and towards inferencing,