Every organization I talk to wants to be “AI-ready,” but few want to discuss what that entails. It’s rarely a new model or agent. More often, it’s the unglamorous work of ripping out a decade’s worth of infrastructure debt so the network can deliver the bandwidth, consistency and data that artificial intelligence depends on.
In Denver this week, Cisco Systems Inc. and its Splunk unit made a bet that the scarcest resource in the agentic enterprise isn’t intelligence or graphics processing units — it’s trust. The Splunk .conf 2026 show themes and keynotes focused less on dashboards, widgets and features and more on who or what is authorized to act in the agentic era. Every vendor conference typically has a center of gravity that serves as a unifying theme.
At its first Horizon customer and partner event this week, Equinix Inc. argued that the architecture of enterprise artificial intelligence is being reshaped by a simple yet hard-to-answer question: Where should inference run? For the past several years, much of the AI infrastructure conversation has centered on the supply and cost of accelerated computing. The focus has been on graphics processing units, AI factories, training clusters and the unprecedented capital buildout required to support them.
As Nvidia Corp. announced this morning that it has agreed to acquire Hugging Face Inc. for $12.93 billion — one of the largest acquisitions in the company’s history — Chief Executive Jensen Huang promised that the platform will retain its brand, its leadership and, according to both companies, its neutrality. “Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem,” Huang said. “Nvidia compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face.”
Nvidia Corp. delivered another mind-boggling quarter Wednesday. Total revenue reached $96 billion, up more than 100% year over year, with data center revenue at $89 billion and a third-quarter guide of $108 billion. More striking than the quarterly numbers was the guidance Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress dropped midway through the call: Fiscal 2028 revenue should grow roughly 70% — and that is a supply-constrained figure. Customer forecasts, she said, “point to our growth doubling next year.”