With businesses debating whether to host and run the latest wave of AI in the public cloud, in a private cloud, or on-premises, Cloudera is betting on a bit of all of the above.

The company, which offers a hybrid approach to data storage, recently collaborated with Nvidia to roll out a new service that makes it easier for enterprises to build and deploy AI models as the 16-year-old platform continues to remake itself for the AI age. The move, announced at a conference in New York this month, comes on the heels of Cloudera’s June acquisition of Verta, a startup that helps customers manage machine learning models.

Cloudera is building up these tools as CEO Charles Sansbury claims a shift is taking place in how large companies think about their computing needs. Energy and compute costs are driving more global corporations to run generative AI applications on-premise rather than in the cloud, he said.

“A year ago, if you’d asked these large global customers, ‘What does your endpoint computing architecture look like in five years?’ they would have said, most of my workloads are moving to the cloud. Just in the past year, that tune has changed dramatically,” Sansbury told Tech Brew. “Generative AI-based applications for large companies will run on on-premises hardware, not on-cloud, for purposes of control, security, but also cost.”

Keep reading here.—PK

An administration change in Washington could have big consequences across the startup scene in Silicon Valley.

While perhaps not the concern of the average voter, tech topics like an emergent regulatory regime around AI and funding of green tech projects will be on the ballot next month. A new research note from PitchBook attempts to break down what a win for each major political party could mean for different areas of startup funding.

The election has already drawn new political battle lines within the tech industry. Long a Democratic Party stronghold, some of Silicon Valley’s big names have endorsed Donald Trump in recent months, including Marc Andreessen, Elon Musk, and venture capitalist David Sacks, citing stances on tech like cryptocurrency.

Gridlock guaranteed: PitchBook’s report notes that it will likely be difficult even for a party that controls both houses of Congress to take big legislative swings outside of the budget reconciliation process, in which bills like the Inflation Reduction Act have passed with fewer votes than would otherwise be needed thanks to the bypass of the Senate filibuster.

Mixed control of the Oval Office and the two houses of Congress could leave more room for statehouses to fill the vacuum, the report said, as state laws already have on many AI-related issues amid stalled federal regulatory efforts.

Keep reading here.—PK

Meta’s pivot to video continues.

The company, which said that 60% of users’ time spent on Facebook and Instagram is on video content, introduced new tools for advertisers during this year’s Advertising Week. Those tools include:

• A tool called Video Expansion that will give users the ability to expand video content by “generating unseen pixels in each video frame to expand the aspect ratio,” similar to the company’s existing Image Expansion tool, and the ability to make video content from static images using generative AI.
• The ability for advertisers to integrate creator content into collections ads on Reels and “additional surfaces.”
• A Partnership Ads Hub, which will house all partnership ads tools, including creator campaigns, on a single page in Ads Manager.

Meta also touted its new, full-screen video tab for Reels on Facebook, which was first announced at its Facebook IRL event in Austin, Texas. At a press event earlier this month, Nicola Mendelsohn, head of Meta’s global business group, emphasized the “diversity of ad formats” opened up by full-screen video, including standalone video, carousel ads, in-stream ads, and overlay ads.

Keep reading here.—KH