What's up: The AI CEO; Nvidia faces mounting competition from everyone; Russia falls behind in the AI race

Good morning. IBM said Monday it agreed to acquire data-infrastructure company Confluent for around $11 billion, the WSJ’s Lauren Thomas reports.

IBM agreed to pay $31 a share for Confluent. The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday evening that IBM and Confluent were in advanced deal talks.

Confluent had a market value of around $8 billion as of Friday, while IBM’s was around $290 billion. Confluent shares surged more than 25% in premarket trading Monday, while IBM’s fell slightly.

An acquisition of Confluent would be the biggest deal for IBM in recent memory as it repositions its business around AI. Confluent is focused on real-time data, tied to one the most important emerging clusters of AI applications. There are nearly endless potential uses for streaming data in the enterprise.

Confluent says its platform is used for financial services, retail, autonomous cars, fraud detection and the so-called internet of things. That can include all sorts of networked objects from light bulbs to factory equipment or agricultural machinery.

The 11-year-old company based in Mountain View, Calif., in October said third-quarter revenue rose 19% on a year-over-year basis to $298.5 million and that customers included Siemens Healthineers, a global medical technology business.

Data infrastructure deals have been on the rise, including Salesforce’s $8 billion deal for data-management software firm Informatica. Last year, IBM agreed to buy cloud-software provider HashiCorp for $6.4 billion, taking it further into cloud and AI offerings.

Confluent is built on the open-source Apache Kafka platform.

IBM CEO Arvind Krishna has been remaking the tech giant around cloud and AI, and Confluent would boost its capabilities in sectors including retail, technology and financial services, where real-time data is key.

The message out of Big Tech these days is that even the CEO’s job is at risk with the rise of AI, WSJ's Tim Higgins writes.

We’re accustomed to all of the talk about superintelligent AI vacuuming up office jobs and robots replacing workers on factory floors. But now the corner office appears to be in trouble, too.

“What a CEO does is maybe one of the easier things…for an AI to do,” Sundar Pichai, chief executive of Google parent Alphabet, told a reporter recently.

Meanwhile, there was plenty of talk about AI taking over jobs at The Wall Street Journal's Tech Live Qatar event last week. The question came up on stage, over meals and in conversations alongside the conference. Even the most optimistic technology executives said the labor market should brace for at least some disruptions in the months ahead, WSJ reports.

Meta Platforms said it bought Limitless, a maker of wearable AI devices, a deal coming as Meta has shown increased interest in AI investment, WSJ reports.

“Within our overall Reality Labs portfolio, we are shifting some of our investment from metaverse toward AI glasses and wearables given the momentum there,” a Meta spokeswoman told the Journal on Thursday.

For a decade, one company has maintained a near-total stranglehold on the business of selling the advanced computer chips that power machine learning and AI: Nvidia.

That’s starting to change. New entrants to the AI chip-design business, including Google and Amazon, are talking about selling their most advanced chips, which rival Nvidia’s GPUs in power and efficiency, to an array of outside customers, WSJ reports.

Smaller rivals like Advanced Micro Devices, Qualcomm and Broadcom are introducing products that help them focus more intently on AI data-center computing. Even some of Nvidia’s biggest customers, like ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and Meta Platforms, are beginning to design their own custom chips, presenting a fresh challenge to the company’s ubiquity.

Putin wanted AI supremacy. Now Russia is struggling to stay in the race. President Vladimir Putin has often proclaimed that Russia must lead the world in AI. In reality, the country is stuck on the sidelines as others pull ahead, WSJ reports.

As the U.S. and China race to dominate AI models and applications and countries in Europe and the Middle East pour resources into building computing infrastructure, the Ukraine war has derailed Russia’s once lofty ambitions.

The accounting uproar over how fast an AI chip depreciates. A debate is raging over the accounting treatment of Nvidia chips and other equipment that tech companies are splurging on. This time, some of the AI companies’ critics may be overreaching, WSJ's Jonathan Weil writes.

Republicans have yet to coalesce around a healthcare strategy just days before an expected vote on extending enhanced Obamacare subsidies, triggering concerns from some GOP lawmakers about a voter backlash. (WSJ)

China’s trade surplus in goods this year topped $1 trillion for the first time, a milestone that underscores the dominance that the country has attained in everything from high-end electric vehicles to low-end T-shirts. (WSJ)

President Trump’s firing spree at federal agencies has snowballed into a Supreme Court showdown over how modern American government should work. (WSJ)

The WSJ CIO Journal Team is Steven Rosenbush, Isabelle Bousquette and Belle Lin.

The editor, Tom Loftus, can be reached at thomas.loftus@wsj.com.