Thanks for reading The Briefing, our nightly column where we break down the day’s news. If you like what you see, I encourage you to subscribe to our reporting here.
Greetings!
Mark Zuckerberg is on a roll. Fresh off his triumphant rollout of the Muse personal agent, he signaled his commitment to selling AI to companies by announcing the poaching of CJ Desai, MongoDB’s CEO, as head of a newly created Meta Enterprise Platform business. Desai has had a long career in enterprise software, at companies including ServiceNow and Cloudflare before MongoDB, making him a significant hire.
We still don’t know exactly how expansive Meta Platforms’ ambitions are for enterprise. Will Zuckerberg use some of its data center capacity to go into the neocloud business? Zuckerberg’s announcement—and Desai’s own background—suggest Meta is more interested in selling AI agents and software to businesses. Whatever the case, Zuckerberg must have made a good case to Desai about the scope of his ambitions. Desai only joined MongoDB last November, and presumably he wouldn’t have bolted without a very good reason (and/or a big paycheck). It’s a pity he couldn’t have negotiated a better title than chief enterprise platform officer, however.
Desai’s hiring certainly sends a message. As Gil Luria, an analyst with D.A. Davidson, said on The Information’s TITV on Monday: “To make sure that we realize how serious [Zuckerberg] is, he hired a CEO of a publicly traded company to lead this business.”
By (journalistic) law, we have to mention that Meta has tried and failed before to sell products to businesses, such as its ill-fated Slack competitor, Workplace, which got shut down a couple of years ago. Clara Shih, whom Meta hired from Salesforce to run a new unit selling AI tools to businesses, left after a year. Still, let’s not write off Meta in this arena. After all, it generated $114 billion in the first half of this year selling ads to businesses, including many large companies. That gives it a starting point for its AI services business. It’s always easier to pitch to a business when you already have a relationship with them.
Both Google and Amazon have pursued that approach. We wrote in 2022 how Amazon has a group called the Pan-Amazon team that tries to persuade its cloud customers to buy advertising and other products from different parts of the company. Google, which is dominant in advertising but not so much in cloud, has also packaged the two services together. Now, whether this works for Meta may depend on how it’s done. Meta’s AI salespeople probably shouldn’t call the marketing people the ad team deals with. That might confuse the marketing people at the would-be client and make the company look like a bunch of amateurs.
Meta’s biggest challenge is that it is jumping into a very crowded market. Not only is there a host of enterprise software firms and big cloud companies trying to sell different kinds of AI services to businesses, but AI firms such as Anthropic and OpenAI are doing the same thing. Meta is dominant in social media advertising: It will find selling AI to businesses a much, much more competitive operation.
MongoDB’s Shock
Meanwhile, Desai’s departure for Meta certainly isn’t so great for his former employer MongoDB, seeing as Desai only took the reins of the cloud database firm last November.
Mongo stock plunged 19% on the news, which prompted the company to bring back Desai’s predecessor as CEO, Dev Ittycheria, as interim president and CEO while it looks for a permanent replacement. The board may have a short list to go back to, actually, as it hired Desai after what it called a comprehensive search.
Desai’s decision to jump to Meta after such a short time at MongoDB wasn’t popular with some folks around the latter company, judging from online reaction. One former MongoDB staffer made this oblique post on X clearly aimed at Desai, telling him, “Enjoy your time…selling ads.”
Nvidia’s Buyback
Nvidia might be doing a lot of deals, investing in customers and even providing financial support to data center projects. But it still has a growing amount of money to buy back stock, as the AI chip giant made clear on Monday.
Nvidia announced its board had authorized a new $150 billion buyback program. Including buybacks already approved, that increases the total program to $235 billion. And it expects to purchase back all that stock through fiscal 2028—a period that ends in about 16 months.
That implies Nvidia will buy back $39 billion every quarter over six quarters, which is roughly double what it spent on buybacks in the most recent quarter. Still, the company can easily afford it. Analysts estimate Nvidia will generate a total of $436 billion in free cash flow over the next six quarters, giving it the flexibility to pursue the buybacks and continue making lots of investments.
In Other News
• Instinct, Silicon Valley’s hot AI assistant of the moment, is hiring Ben Schwerin, an investor at Coatue Management, as its first chief business officer. Before working at Coatue, Schwerin built Snap’s partnership business and worked closely alongside CEO Evan Spiegel.
• Nvidia on Monday released new software and hardware products to prevent hacking incidents such as the breach in July of Hugging Face and other companies by OpenAI’s AI.
• LiveRamp, which helps advertisers use customer data to target and measure ads, said Monday it is expanding its partnership with OpenAI so advertisers can target their ads in ChatGPT based on customer data they collect, a feature already available with Google and Meta.
• Advanced Micro Devices said Monday it has agreed to buy World Labs, a two-year-old maker of models that can simulate three-dimensional spaces, for about $8.2 billion in an all-stock transaction.
• SpaceX launched its Starship rocket into orbit on Monday morning in a historic first for the company. It was the 14th test flight of the massive rocket ship but the first that has reached orbit. The rocket released 26 of SpaceX’s’s new Starlink V3 satellites about 10 minutes after reaching orbit.
• Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier on Monday asked a Florida state court for an injunction that would bar OpenAI from developing new AI models “without third-party approved safety guardrails” and from allowing minors to use ChatGPT.
Today on The Information’s TITV
Check out today’s episode of TITV in which we analyze the news about Meta’s poaching of the MongoDB CEO.
Recommended Newsletter
Start your day with Applied AI, the newsletter from The Information that uncovers how leading businesses are leveraging AI to automate tasks across the board. Subscribe now for free to get it delivered straight to your inbox twice a week.
Can the grid keep pace with AI? Steve LeVine moderates a live discussion with William Mao, Allan Schurr, and Brian Janous on scaling data centers for the AI era. Register now.
As enterprises move beyond AI deployment, where is real value landing? Aaron Holmes moderates this live discussion unpacking AI ROI with executives from Celonis and National Life Group. Register today.
The Information's WTF Summit returns to Napa Valley, bringing together the women shaping tech, media and finance. Confirmed speakers include Whitney Wolfe Herd (Bumble), Anne Wojcicki (23andMe Research Institute), Kim Posnett (Goldman Sachs) and comedian & entrepreneur Whitney Cummings, with more to come. Expect candid conversations and a room built for meaningful exchange. Tickets are selling fast, with the next price increase coming soon.
