That’s on brand.

According to a new report from valuation firm Brand Finance, the world’s top IT services companies are worth $163 billion. The projection is the result of increased spending in a booming tech market.

Lorenzo Coruzzi, Brand Finance’s valuation director, told IT Brew that the analysis is based on a number of factors, from ranking companies on their market cap, to brand awareness, to talking to consumers about who they trust most. Of course, for IT services, which is primarily a B2B business, this means talking to companies that use their services.

“These questions are answered by a CTO in a company that wants to implement digital transformation, or a CIO in a company that wants to decide who to call in to have a digitization undertaking in the company,” Coruzzi said.

Line ’em up. Brand Finance found that Accenture is the number one global IT services brand, with a valuation of $41.5 billion. The firm, with a global presence and a highly recognizable brand, took the top spot for the seventh year in a row. The other US company in the top five, from IBM Consulting, was in fourth place, behind Indian firms TCS and Infosys.

Notably, while US firms accounted for 41.7% of global brand valuation, India was right behind at 36.1%. Next highest was Japan, at 9.5%. It’s a sign of how the country’s tech sector is advancing. With a valuation of just over $21 billion, TCS has seen a massive 826% growth in the last 15 years.

Read the rest here.—EH

Tech behemoth Microsoft is putting billions into AI in 2025, and one of the first projects it’s looking at is a company division focused on developers.

That division, “CoreAI - Platform and Tools,” is being led by new hire EVP Jay Parikh, formerly global head of engineering at Facebook. In an internal note on Jan. 13, CEO Satya Nadella wrote that Microsoft has expansive plans for the sector.

Those plans include building out AI agentic applications, “a new AI-first app stack,” and connecting existing Microsoft platforms, products, and affiliates like Azure and GitHub. In order to link all that work together, Nadella continued, the company created CoreAI.

Names and numbers. CoreAI is expected to integrate with the other engineering divisions at Microsoft, Nadella wrote. Parikh will work alongside CTO Kevin Scott and other top Microsoft executives.

Nadella added that Microsoft expects its cloud infrastructure business to continue to grow and become the largest part of the company. That tracks with an announcement earlier in the month, on Jan. 3, that Microsoft is investing $80 billion in 2025 “to build out AI-enabled data centers to train AI models and deploy AI and cloud-based applications around the world.”

Read more here.—EH

A young upstart has the number-one spot, and we’re not talking about the Billboard Hot 100.

A free, open-source AI model recently launched by China-based startup DeepSeek is making investors take a LongLook at the companies supplying all that hardware to power today’s artificial intelligence efforts.

DeepSeek surpassed ChatGPT for the top spot in Apple’s App Store, leading to lower valuations on Monday for AI chipmakers like Nvidia and Broadcom.

“DeepSeek-R1 is AI’s Sputnik moment,” investor Marc Andreessen said in a Jan. 26 X post, referring to DeepSeek’s first reasoning model and the 20th century space race.

What is DeepSeek? Hedge-fund co-founder Liang Wenfeng created DeepSeek in 2023. The open-source DeepSeek-V3 model powering the technology relies on activating “only the most relevant portions of their model for each query, and that saves money and computation power,” Giuseppe Sette, president at AI market research firm Reflexivity, shared with CBS News.

About those costs. DeepSeek claimed in a Dec. 2024 paper that its total training costs added up to $5.576 million, assuming the cost is $2 per hour per GPU.

“That is a fraction of what Western hyperscalers are throwing at their LLM training (e.g., it’s 9% of the compute used for Meta’s Llama 3.1 405B model),” Richard Clode, portfolio manager at Janus Henderson Investors, wrote on Jan. 27.

Keep reading here.—BH

Why are women in IT working longer but still missing from leadership? From career hurdles to workplace culture, learn what’s holding them back—and how organizations can step up to close the gap and create opportunities that actually make a difference.