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AMD Expands its Physical AI Offerings with an Open Toolkit and a Direct Challenge to Nvidia

Tom Mainelli — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

AT&T 2Q26 Results: Accelerating Growth, Record Convergence, and Capital Discipline

Jitesh Bhayani — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

AT&T reported second-quarter 2026 consolidated revenue of $31.6 billion, up 2.3% year-over-year (YoY), adjusted EPS of $0.65, up 20.4%, and adjusted EBITDA of $12.3 billion, up 5.2%, for an adjusted EBITDA margin of 39.1%. The company added more than 1 million Advanced Connectivity customers across fiber, fixed wireless, and postpaid phone in a record quarter for combined fiber and fixed wireless net adds and accelerated its planned 2026 share repurchases to approximately $10 billion.

IDC MarketScape: Worldwide AI-Enabled Financial Governance, Risk, and Compliance 2026 Vendor Assessment

Heather Herbst — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study evaluates 11 leading vendors in the worldwide AI-enabled financial governance, risk, and compliance (FGRC) market for 2026, focusing on solutions relevant to the Office of the CFO. The assessment highlights the shift of FGRC from a compliance cost to a strategic capability, emphasizing platform breadth, automation maturity, and AI integration. It provides comparative insights into vendor strengths, challenges, and strategic fit, guiding CFOs in selecting platforms that align with evolving regulatory, risk, and business continuity needs.

"Financial governance, risk, and compliance has shifted from cost center to strategic advantage. CFOs who master FGRC technology will define the future of resilient finance." — Heather Herbst, research director, CFO Buyer Insights

Alphabet 2Q26 Results: AI Investments Drive Commercial Returns

Matthew Eastwood, Dave McCarthy — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Alphabet reported 2Q26 earnings on July 22, delivering another strong quarter as the company's multiyear AI investments increasingly translated into accelerating commercial momentum. Revenue grew 24% year over year to $119.8 billion, marking Alphabet's 12th consecutive quarter of double-digit growth, while operating income increased 30% to $40.8 billion with operating margin remaining a robust 34.0%. Net income increased significantly, driven primarily by $98 billion in unrealized gains on equity securities.

Esri Positions Location as Core Context for the AI-Era Data Estate at the 2026 User Conference

Marlanna Harrington, Megha Kumar — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

At its 2026 User Conference in San Diego (July 13–17), Esri drew more than 18,000 attendees around the theme "GIS: creating a more intelligent world." The company wove AI across ArcGIS in three layers: AI assistants for everyday workflows, AI tools and models, and agentic AI that exposes authoritative GIS content to external agents through Model Context Protocol (MCP). Esri also introduced ArcGIS for ServiceNow, extended real-time capabilities with Velocity on ArcGIS Enterprise, and reinforced digital twins and cloud data warehouse integration. IDC views location as a critical but still under-exploited input to the enterprise data and decisioning estate, one the AI shift could finally push from the periphery toward the core. Esri's challenge is converting breadth into governed, integrated production systems rather than another data silo.

IBM Quantum to Acquire HRL Laboratories, Expanding Its Quantum Technology Portfolio and Developmental Roadmap

Heather West, PhD — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

The acquisition of HRL Laboratories by IBM Quantum (further referred to as IBM) reflects a shift toward acquiring, rather than solely developing in-house, the complementary technologies needed to scale quantum computing beyond a single hardware modality. The deal adds silicon-spin qubits, quantum sensing, and advanced materials expertise to a growing set of IBM investments that increasingly resemble the foundation of a full-stack, distributed quantum computing infrastructure.

Netskope and AI in the Fast Lane

Frank Dickson, Grace Trinidad — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Netskope's AI in the Fast Lane road show stop in New York City on July 14, 2026, showcased the vendor's effort to make AI-native operation governable, organizing Netskope One around a three-stage life cycle of discovering AI usage, securing the AI pipeline, and protecting runtime interactions, with AgentSkope agent risk scoring, MCP scoring, and the AI Command Center as that life cycle's operational layer. The event reinforces IDC's view that competitive differentiation is shifting from the underlying AI model to the harness that governs it, and IDC expects inline enforcement, AI acceleration, and transparent risk scoring to be the dimensions on which vendors in this category separate over the next 18–24 months.

The Building Blocks of a Sustainable Datacenter, 2026: An AI-Era Update

Bjoern Stengel — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Perspective is a 2026 update — version 2.0 — of IDC's framework for sustainable datacenters, refreshing The Building Blocks of a Sustainable Datacenter (IDC #US53167225, March 2025). The five building blocks — goals, commitment, and transparency; sustainable design and construction; natural resources sourcing; natural resources efficiency; and circularity — are preserved within the plan–build–operate model, but each is updated with AI era content. Model and workload efficiency is elevated to a primary subsection under natural resources efficiency; firm clean power, grid-interactive datacenters, and AI hardware supply chain risk are new subsections under natural resources sourcing; AI rack density, modular AI datacenters, and design-time heat recovery are new subsections under sustainable design and construction; and AI-specific ITAD is a new subsection under circularity. The 2026 regulatory landscape — overtaken by EU EED datacenter reporting, the Data Centre Energy Efficiency Package, CSRD Omnibus, CS3D, the EU AI Act, and California SB 253/261 — is treated explicitly, correcting the 2025 edition's assessment that regulation was unlikely to be a significant accelerant. All figures are sourced from IDC's Datacenter Facilities Index, 2H25, and IDC's Datacenter Trends, 2H24, with demand-side evidence from IDC's 2026 AI and Sustainability Survey (n = 1,570) and 2024 comparisons where overtime shifts are material. This IDC Market Perspective serves as the narrative deep dive for Segment 1: Sustainable digital infrastructure of IDC's Sustainable Strategies and Technologies Taxonomy, 2026.

"AI has changed what it means to build and operate a sustainable datacenter. The five building blocks still hold, but each now includes AI era content that wasn't in the 2025 edition — from model and workload efficiency to firm clean power, grid-interactive operation, and AI hardware life cycle. Operators and suppliers that internalize these shifts now will be the ones with credible sustainability stories and resilient business models by the end of the decade." — Bjoern Stengel, global sustainability research and practice lead, Sustainable Strategies and Technologies at IDC

Tigera Targets Networking in VMware Migrations with Calico for VMs on Kubernetes

Taranvir Singh — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Tigera launched Calico for virtual machines (VMs) on Kubernetes, extending its established Kubernetes networking and security to virtual machines so that VMs and containers run on one network under one policy model, preserving existing IPs and firewall rules. The launch is aimed at the networking aspect of a VMware exit strategy, which, if not executed properly, can stall the entire migrations. While vendors like Cisco, Red Hat, and SUSE are pursuing this opportunity in their own ways, Tigera's existing Calico footprint in Kubernetes gives it a credible position as a neutral networking layer to consolidate VMs and containers on Kubernetes.

Certinia Acquires Moonnox, Creating Digital AI Value: Professional Services Automation Platform with AI Architected at the Core

Mickey North Rizza — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Today, Certinia, an AI-powered Professional Services Automation (PSA) vendor, announced it has acquired Moonnox, an AI-native services delivery platform purpose built for the professional services sector. This combination of both an AI-powered PSA vendor and an AI-native services platform enables Certinia to bring even more value with its systems of records of PSA, Financial Management, and Customer Success Cloud Services, through the extension of Certinia's AI System of Action, called Veda, enabling Certinia to become a platform that powers AI-native services with AI architected as the core customer delivery mechanism.