It’s almost like Hobbs and Shaw—two heavyweights putting rivalry aside and teaming up against a common enemy: computing power.

According to a June 10 Reuters report, OpenAI plans to add Alphabet’s Google Cloud service to its list of compute providers. The cloud support will assist OpenAI in training its AI models and meeting the massive computational demands for its jobs, sources told Reuters.

The move raised eyebrows from analysts, given the two companies’ competition.

“Ultimately, we view this as a big win for Google’s cloud unit, but...there are continued worries that ChatGPT is becoming an incrementally larger threat to Google’s search dominance,” Scotiabank examiners wrote in a Tuesday note.

Compete, compute. In addition to search, both companies compete as AI builders. Alphabet’s Google DeepMind lab has created models like Gemini 2.5, while OpenAI has introduced recent LLMs like OpenAI o3 and o4-mini.

How much compute power can Google provide?—BH

During this year’s Cisco Live event, the networking giant made one thing clear: It wants to be the backbone of powering and securing the agentic AI era.

Cisco announced several hardware updates and product rollouts meant to support AI-powered workplaces during the event, which took place in San Diego between June 8–12, including:

• Upgrades to its Universal Zero Trust architecture that will allow it to secure agentic identities and provide “comprehensive tracking of agent actions.”
• New Silicon One-powered smart switches equipped to power “high-stakes AI applications.” The company also announced new ruggedized switches that can support autonomous mobile robots.
• An AI assistant powered by its Deep Network Model, a large language model that has been trained on Cisco’s knowledge base.
• New generations of products in the company’s hybrid mesh firewall portfolio.
• New 400G bidirectional optics that will be available later on in the year.

Leading role. During a June 5 pre-briefing, Cisco president and CPO Jeetu Patel told attendees that the industry is undergoing one of the “most consequential technology shifts in human history.” He said AI will soon be able to solve problems that were once unsolvable.

Can Cisco lead the agentic AI revolution?—BM

A vulnerability is affecting ASUS routers from the private sector to the federal government, allowing remote access. Luckily, the solution falls in the realm of classic help desk duties.

That’s according to a report from the group GreyNoise Intelligence, who uncovered the backdoor access in March but refrained from revealing it publicly until ASUS could notify government agencies who might be compromised by the vulnerability.

GreyNoise Senior Researcher Matthew Remacle, who was the lead on the ASUS research, told IT Brew that attackers are exploiting the routers to allow themselves a backdoor to control connected devices.

Time to reset some routers.—EH