Snowflake unveiled the deal at the close of the market bell on Wednesday, when it also announced its Q3 2025 earnings. The purchase hasn't yet closed, and it's subject to customary closing conditions, Snowflake noted in a release. Joseph Witt and Luke Roquet, who met while working together at Hortonworks, founded Datavolo in 2023. Witt was previously CVP at Cloudera, while Roquet was Cloudera's CMO and, before that, a business development executive at AWS. Datavolo uses Apache NiFi, an open source project for data processing developed by the NSA, to power a platform for automating data flows between various enterprise data sources. Data 'processors' extract, clean, transform, and enrich data, including for generative AI use cases. With Datavolo, which managed to raise $21 million in venture capital from investors including Citi Ventures and General Catalyst prior to the acquisition, Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy envisions creating more versatile data processing pipelines for Snowflake customers. For example, he says, Datavolo might enable users to replace single-use data connectors with flexible pipelines that let them move data from cloud and on-premise sources to Snowflake's data cloud....

Nvidia raked in more than $19 billion in net income during the last quarter, the company reported on Wednesday, but that did little to assure investors that its rapid growth would continue. On its earnings call, analysts prodded CEO Jensen Huang about how Nvidia would fare if tech companies start using new methods to improve their AI models. The method that underpins OpenAI's o1 model, or 'test-time scaling,' came up quite a lot. It's the idea that AI models will give better answers if you give them more time and computing power to 'think' through questions. Specifically, it adds more compute to the AI inference phase, which is everything that happens after a user hits enter on their prompt. Huang indicated that o1, and test-time scaling more broadly, could play a larger role in Nvidia's business moving forward, calling it 'one of the most exciting developments' and 'a new scaling law.' Huang did his best to ensure investors that Nvidia is well-positioned for the change. This is a big deal for the chip industry because it places a greater emphasis on AI inference. While Nvidia's chips are the gold standard for training AI models, there's a broad set of well-funded startups creating lightning-fast AI inference chips, such as Groq and Cerebras. It could be a more competitive space for Nvidia to operate in....

When I was taking German in college in the early years of this millennium, I once stumbled upon a word that appeared foreign even when translated into English: Diphtherie, or diphtheria. 'What's diphtheria'' I wondered, having never encountered a single soul afflicted by this disease. Diphtheria, once known as the 'strangling angel,' was a leading killer of children into the early 20th century. The bacterial infection destroys the lining of the throat, forming a layer of dead, leathery tissue that can cause death by suffocation. The disease left no corner of society untouched: Diphtheria killed Queen Victoria's daughter, and the children of Presidents Lincoln, Garfield, and Cleveland. Parents used to speak of their first and second families, an elderly woman in Ottawa recalled, because diphtheria had swept through and all their children died. Today, diphtheria has been so thoroughly forgotten that someone like me, born some 60 years after the invention of a diphtheria vaccine, might have no inkling of the fear it once inspired. If you have encountered diphtheria outside of the historical context, it's likely because you have scrutinized a childhood immunization schedule: It is the 'D' in the DTaP vaccine....

When I lived in China, a decade ago, I often saw propaganda billboards covered in words that supposedly expressed the country's values: Patriotism. Harmony. Equality. And ' Democracy. Indeed, China claims to consider itself a democratic country. So do Russia, Cuba, Iran, and so on down the list of nations ranked by their level of commitment to rights and liberties. Even North Korea fancies itself part of the club. It's right there in the official name: the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. I thought of those Chinese billboards recently, when a postelection poll showed that many American voters touted the importance of democracy while supporting a candidate who had tried to overturn the results of the previous presidential election. According to a survey by the Associated Press, a full one-third of Trump voters said that democracy was their top issue. (Two-thirds of Harris voters said the same thing.) In a poll conducted before Joe Biden dropped out of the race, seven out of 10 uncommitted swing-state voters said they doubted that Donald Trump would accept the election results if he lost'but more people said they'd trust Trump to handle threats to democracy than said they'd trust Biden....