Welcome to episode 292 of The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week Justin and Jonathan are a dynamic duo, bringing you all the latest in news – and sound effects – because it’s earnings time! Plus we’ve got new from VS Code, Azure Data Studio, CodeBuild and more. 

Titles we almost went with this week:

• ☁️The Cloud Pod Renames Cloud Earnings to ‘The Gulf of Capex’
• 🪙Sorry Elon, OpenAI Doesn’t Want Your Pocket Change
• 🚗MacOS gets into the Fastlane for Oil Changes

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

We’re sponsorless! Want to get your brand, company, or service in front of a very enthusiastic group of cloud news seekers? You’ve come to the right place! Send us an email or hit us up on our slack channel for more info. 

General News

It’s earnings time! 

01:29 Alphabet is planning to spend big on AI again this year, sending shares down

• Alphabet earnings were a bit of a let down with cloud revenue missing and their announcement of spending $75 Billion in CapEx (DeepSeek who?)
• Consolidated revenue rose 12% in the period to 96.5 billion. 
• Capex investments of $75b shocked analysts who expected $57.9 billion.
• EPS was 2.15 vs 2.13.
• Revenue of 96.5 billion vs 96.62 expected.
• Ad revenue rose to 72.46 billion vs 71.3, Youtube advertising revenue was 10.47 billion vs 10.22 billion. 
• Google Cloud was 12.0 billion vs expectation of 12.19 billion.

02:09 📢 Jonathan – “I’m guessing ad revenue is gonna be down again, Q1, Q2 because I think a lot of ad revenue is driven by the election season. So that’s not looking too good for them.”

03:13 Microsoft GAAP EPS of $3.23 beats by $0.13, revenue of $69.6B beats by $790M

• Microsoft followed up with also weak growth in its Azure cloud computing unit. 
• EPS was 3.23 beating expectations by 0.13
• Revenue of 69.6B beating by 780M
• Intelligent cloud revenue was 25.5 billion an increase of 19%
• Microsoft indicated they plan to spend 80 Billion in CapEx for AI and data center growth. 

04:02 📢 Justin- “Also international expansion still, I think a big area too, particularly for Azure and Google and even Amazon. Like they’re all announcing more and more regions, more expansion of data centers, lots of laws that are going to pass for data sovereignty that they have to deal with. there’s, there’s spend everywhere.”

04:23 Amazon earnings recap: Stock falls as guidance falls short, CFO indicates capex of more than $100 billion in 2025 

• Amazon followed its peers by indicating they will invest $100B in CapEx for Amazon’s AI efforts on AWS
• CEO Andy Jassy said that AWS could grow faster if they were not hindered by datacenter capacity…which is really interesting. We’re assuming GPU capacity. 
• Amazon reported sales of 187.79B, beating estimates of 187.32 billion, EPS was 1.86 compared to $1.50 expected. 
• AWS was a little light compared to estimates at 28.79B compared to expectations of 28.82 billion, but what’s 300 million between friends? 
• Amazon guided lighter than analysts expected at 151b to 155.5 billion, vs expectations 158.64 billion. Also penalized in after hours markets. 

06:04 📢 Justin- “I would assume inference, you know, becomes the bigger area of investment long-term, but short-term, you know, you need to train. they, I think a lot of their stuff, they’ve like training them and those things were really focused primarily at training first. So inference seems to be where everyone’s spending most of their money these days.”

AI Is Going Great – Or How ML Makes All Its Money  

06:39 OpenAI CEO Appears to Reject Elon Musk’s $97 Billion Takeover Bid 

• Elon recently made an unsolicited bid to buy Open AI for 97.4 Billion.  
• On Monday, Sam Altman rejected the offer. 
• Altman told his staff that Musk’s effort was “embarrassing,” and not in the best interest of the OpenAI mission to develop artificial general intelligence to benefit humanity. 
• Altman also declared that this is Musk’s attempt to slow down a competitor.
• This does cause some complications, as OpenAI continues to plan to shift away from its non-profit roots. 
• If the plan is for the non-profit to sell the for profit business, this bid makes it more expensive for the internal sale of the assets. 

07:42 📢 Jonathan – “It’s interesting that he made a bid. I mean, I don’t think he would have actually filed through on it personally. Now he’s got XAI and Grok 3 coming out soon and those other things. I agree with Sam Altman that it was probably just a distraction to mess with things. But he has drawn a line in the sand at $97.4 billion though.”

08:41 Introducing the intelligence age 

• Super Bowl Ads were all the rage over the weekend, during the drumming of the KC chiefs by the Philadelphia Eagles 40-22.  
• Justin was really hoping for cloud commercials to talk about, but they didn’t materialize (and we DO NOT count Google’s android ads). 
• *But* OpenAI debuted their first ever ad. View it here. 
• We’re interested in you think! Let us know on social or via our Slack channel what you thought of the ad. 

10:03 📢 Jonathan – “I actually liked the look of it. The first time I saw it, I was like, this is a bit strange. But I liked the halftone look. reminds me of newspaper print and news unfolding over the years. It was kind of neat. I’m glad I didn’t spend the extra 8 million on another 30 seconds, though, and showing the doom that’s going to come out and the poverty. Yeah, like the desolate wasteland of Earth after nobody’s got a job anymore.”

12:32 OpenAI’s secret weapon against Nvidia dependence takes shape 

• Open AI is in the final stages of designing its long rumored AI processor with the aim of decreasing the company’s dependence on Nvidia hardware, per Reuters. 
• ChatGPT plans to leverage TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.) for fabrication within the next few months, but the chip has not yet formally been announced. 
• The first chip will use TSMCs’ 3-nanometer process. 
• The chips will incorporate high-bandwidth memory and networking features similar to those found in NVIDIA processors. 
• Initially the first chips will focus on running models (inference) rather than training them, with limited deployment across OpenAI.  
•  The goal is for mass production to start in 2026. The hardware will likely end up in Stargate and/or Microsoft data centers.

13:57 📢 Justin – “I’m actually shocked just this long for them to announce that they were doing their own chip and to, you know, they actually haven’t announced it technically, but you know, rumors come out that they’re doing one. There’s been some scuttlebutt about it, but this is a pretty firm, you know, research paper by the, or news article by the Reuters. So yeah, very interesting.”

AWS  

15:04 AWS CodeBuild for macOS adds support for Fastlane 

• Fastlane for AWS CodeBuild has now come to the Mac OS environments. 
• Fastlane is an open source tool suite designed to automate various aspects of mobile app development.  
• It provides mobile app developers with a centralized set of tools to manage tasks such as code signing, screenshot generation, beta distribution and app store submissions. 
• Fully integrated with popular CI and CD platforms, it supports IOS and Android development workflows. 
• Previously you could install Fastlane on your codebuild for MacOS installs, but it was undifferentiated heavy lifting and now you get it installed by default. 

16:16 Introducing JSONL support with Step Functions Distributed Map

• AWS Step Functions is expanding its capabilities of Distributed Map by adding support for JSONL (JSON Lines)
• JSONL, a highly efficient text-based format, stores structured data as individual JSON objects separated by newlines, making it particularly suitable for large datasets. 
• This allows you to process large collection of items stored in JSONL format directly through distributed map and optionally exports the output of the Distributed Map as JSONL file. 
• The enhancement also introduces support for additional delimited file formats, including semicolon and tab-delimited files, providing greater flexibility in data source options. 

16:51 📢 Jonathan – “That’s really cool, actually, because thinking about streaming data, like log data, everyone’s moved to JSON logs, except now we just emit a text event with valid JSON, but it goes into the same file. So JSON lines are very much, I think, designed for log handling, log scanning, looking for patterns there. So this is really nice. It means we don’t have to have a separate Lambda function that reads in a 50 gigabyte file and breaks it into pieces first.”

GCP

19:08 BigQuery datasets now available on Google Cloud Marketplace

• Google is announcing datasets on the Google Cloud Marketplace through BIgQuery Analytics Hub, opening up new avenues for organizations to power innovative analytics use cases and procure data for enterprise business needs. 
• Using Google Cloud Marketplace offers access as a centralized procurement tool to a wide array of enterprise apps, foundational AI models, LLMs, and now commercial and free datasets from third-party data providers and Google. 
• Combined with BigQuery Analytics hub you can enable cross-organizational zero-copy sharing at scale, with governance, security and encryption all built in natively. 

19:57 📢 Jonathan – “I think they’re slowly putting them back again by court order. yeah, I guess Google has the advantage here though, because they don’t have to copy the data. They make it, they keep one copy and everyone has access to it. Whereas Amazon, I don’t think quite got there yet, did they?”

20:51 Announcing public beta of Gen AI Toolbox for Databases

• Google is launching the public beta of Gen AI Toolbox for Databases in partnership with LangChain, the leading orchestration framework for developers building large language models. 
• Gen AI Toolbox is an open-source server that empowers application developers to connect production-grade, agent based generative AI applications to databases.  Streamlining the creation, deployment and management of sophisticated gen AI tools capable of querying databases with secure access, robust observability, scalability and comprehensive manageability. 
• It can currently connect to self managed PostGreSQL, MySQL, as well as managed offerings like AlloyDB, spanner, and CloudSQL for Postgres, Mysql and SQL server. 

22:32 Rightsize your Memorystore for Redis Clusters with open-source Autoscaler

• Last year google gave us Memorystore for Redis Clusters with the ability to manually trigger scale out and down.  
• Now, to meet the elastic nature of modern Memorystore workloads, they are excited to announce the open-source Memorystore Cluster Autoscaler available on Github, which builds on the open source panner autoscaler from 2020. 
• The autoscaler consists of two components the Poller and the Scaler, which monitors via cloud monitoring the health and performance of the memorystore cluster instances. 
• Justin specifically appreciates this, but it’s a hack, and should be something they build into the service long term. But we remember AWS had this moment too at one point where they would give you automation solutions and then deliver full automation in the service a year or two later. 

23:05📢 Justin  – “I’d really like you to just build this into the product. Like why is this an open source thing that I have to run on my own server or infrastructure. But yeah, in fairness to Google, Amazon used to do this too. They would build like these custom solutions that they put on their GitHub thing. And then eventually a lot of people downloaded those things. Those eventually became future products within a couple of years.”

24:08 Gemini 2.0 is now available to everyone       

• Google has made 2.0 Flash available to all users of Gemini App on desktop and mobile, helping everyone discover new ways to create, interact and collaborate with Gemini. 
• Today, we’re making the updated Gemini 2.0 flash generally available via the Gemini API in Google AI Studio and Vertex AI.  Developers can now build production applications with 2.0 flash. 

24:32 📢 Jonathan – “It’s quite a stretch to say build production applications. I mean, I guess you can build applications, maybe if you’re lucky. I played with Gemini 2, and I played with their deep research. Gemini’s 1.5 deep research offering a few days ago. I think it’s got a way to go. I don’t think it’s quite there with OpenAI’s version of the same thing just yet.”

Azure

27:24 Azure Data Studio Retirement 

• Azure is announcing the upcoming retirement of Azure Data Studio (ADS) on February 6th, 2025 as they focus on delivering a modern, streamlined SQL development experience. 
• ADS will remain supported until February 28th, 2026, giving developers ample time to transition. 
• This decision aligns with their commitment to simplifying SQL development by consolidation efforts on VS code with MSSQL extension, a powerful and versatile tool designed for modern developers
• But why… Well:
  • They want to focus on innovation, and VS code provides a robust platform.
  • Streamlined Tools eliminates duplication, reduces engineering, maintenance overhead, and accelerates feature delivery, ensuring developers have access to the latest innovations. 
• Transition to VS Code gets you a modern development environment and a comprehensive set of MSSQL Extensions. 
  • Execute queries faster with filtering, sorting and export options JSON, Excel and CSV.
  • Manage schemas visually with Table Designer, Object Explorer and support for keys, indexes and constraints. 
  • Connect to SQL Server, Azure SQL (all offerings), and SQL database in Fabric using an improved Connection Dialog
  • Streamline development with scripting, object modifications, and a unified SQL experience
  • Optimize performance with an enhanced Query Results Pane and execution plans. 
  • Integrate with DevOps and CI/CD pipelines using SQL Database projects. 

29:30 📢 Justin – “Visual Studio is an anchor. It’s so big. It’s so complicated. And if you’re trying to get people to do modern.net development with C sharp, you don’t need all that bloat. Like that, they’re still supporting WCF frameworks which are 20 years old at this point. You don’t need that in modern .NET web development. So it makes sense to me that they’re divorcing themselves from Visual Studio.”

Off Topic 

35:55 Gulf of America name change in the U.S. — what you’ll see in Maps 

• If anyone knows of a plugin that will put it back for Chrome… we’re all ears.
• Google has updated the Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America for those in the US. If you are in Mexico you’ll still see the Gulf of Mexico, and if you’re in the rest of the world you’ll see the Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America). 
• This is fine. 

04:38 NotebookLM Plus is now available in the Google One AI Premium 

subscription 

• NotebookLM is a research and thinking companion designed to help you make the most of your information.  You can upload material, summarize it, ask questions and transform it into something engaging, like a podcast-style audio discussion.  NotebookLM can help you ace a career certification, generate ideas or synthesize data for a project.
• NotebookLM plus to the google one AI premium plan, a version with higher usage limits and premium features for even more customized research. 

Closing

And that is the week in the cloud! Visit our website, the home of the Cloud Pod where you can join our newsletter, slack team, send feedback or ask questions at theCloud Pod.net or tweet at us with hashtag #theCloudPod