Hello, sharks! Deals are happening again in the tech sector.

PwC, in a midyear outlook published on its site in June, saw US tech company transactions picking back up in the first quarter of 2024: Overall transaction value in the first five months of 2024 reached $535 billion—a near 30% increase from the $412 billion reached in the same period the previous year, the management consulting company reported.

One driver of the rebound, according to PwC, is that hot little two-letter technology: AI.

Click here for the AI-inspired deals cited in the report.—BH

Legacy networks used to be the end-all-be-all solution. But today’s growing demands are making these manual, somewhat fragmented systems buckle under pressure.

Increasing network complexity is a real issue. That’s why simplified ops courtesy of Juniper’s AI-Native Network can scale to your users and applications, automate a wide range of manual actions, and proactively solve problems before they impact user experiences. This can also foster:

• up to 90% fewer trouble tickets
• up to 85% fewer truck rolls
• up to 9x faster deploy

Juniper Networks is the industry’s first AI-native networking platform, helping elevate user experiences and streamline operations across Wi-Fi and wired, SD-WAN, WAN Edge, data center, security, and more. It’s all under one AI-engine + cloud’s roof.

See its possibilities.

Data meets efficiency in Vienna, Austria, where a data center nestled in the Floridsdorf neighborhood provides heat for a public hospital. Digital Realty’s data center uses a heat pump system from regional energy provider Wien Energie to heat up the neighboring Klinik Floridsdorf hospital, around 150 meters (490 feet) away.

“Using local heat sources is essential for the energy transition,” Rusbeh Rezania, CFO and commercial director of Wien Energie, told IT Brew in an email. The project cost €3.5 million, or around $3.8 million, and was partially funded by the Austrian Ministry of Climate Protection.

IT Brew caught up with Rezania to chat about the project’s origins and what’s next.

Tell us a bit more about your project—how long has this been in the works?

“We began construction in autumn 2022 and started operations in winter 2023 to 24,” he said. “During this period, we built a heat pump system at the hospital, connecting it to the data center’s cooling system with a short pipe. Since the past heating season, Wien Energie has been efficiently recycling excess heat from the server rooms and converting it into district heating for the clinic.”

This system “allows us to cover between 50% and 70% of the hospital’s heating demand, and save up to 4,000 tons of CO2 per year,” he said, also noting that “there are virtually no heat losses” since “the connecting pipe is quite short.”

Read more here.—AF

It’s AI party time, and we’re just tapping the second keg.

That’s the message from Dan Ives, an analyst with Wedbush Securities whose focus is on the tech industry.

“I believe it’s 9pm in an AI party that goes to 4am,” Ives said. “Many investors have sat on the sidelines and fretted about valuation and some other doomsday scenarios and missed this historic tech run. But we don’t believe it’s over.”

Bubble boys. Ives is not alone in his optimism, but as Tech Brew reported on July 10, many investors are beginning to fear there’s an AI bubble. Concerns over the continuing utility of the technology and its profit potential are increasing as researchers and analysts question the wisdom of continued investment.

“People are jumping on the AI bandwagon thinking that money will come because they somehow have incorporated AI into their business model,” VC firm Wocstar CEO Gayle Jennings O’Bryne told Inc. “But in reality, what they may have done is just put a bit of AI functionality as a wrapper to a more traditional business model.”

The two schools of thought on the AI moment—whether it’s an opportunity or a bubble—could be summed up as what Ives referred to as a 1995 or 1999 moment—the former marking the beginning of a tech wave and the latter just before a tech bubble nearly crashed the economy. Ives sees it as 1995: “We don’t view this as a bubble.”

Keep reading here.—EH

Patch things up. Did you know that ransomware outcomes can differ based on whether the attack began with an unpatched vulnerability vs. compromised credentials? Sophos dives into the details in their latest report. See how attack severity and operational impact can vary depending on the root case—and how much it could cost ya.