IBM's Weaker Q2 Results and AI Pivot Reshape Investment Case

Cisco Systems has pushed Splunk AI deeper into private infrastructure with a new Nvidia-backed AI POD built for self-managed and air-gapped environments. The platform, available now, pairs Cisco infrastructure with Nvidia computing and Kubernetes, while Splunk's Tokenomics tool is designed to track AI spending across agents and employee coding tools and estimate future consumption before the billing cycle closes. Cisco is also widening the commercial opportunity beyond the data center after signing a multiyear agreement with Amazon Web Services to jointly develop security products. Cisco said it received $9.3 billion of hyperscaler AI-infrastructure orders during fiscal 2026, equal to roughly 14.7% of its $63.3 billion annual revenue, though orders are not revenue. Cisco shares were up roughly 0.1% at $110.24.

Palantir and Nvidia have reportedly tightened restrictions around Anthropic's advanced AI models over data-retention concerns, with Palantir demanding irrevocable zero-data-retention guarantees before making the models available through its software and Nvidia limiting Claude to less-sensitive internal work. Palantir's September 10 sovereign-AI push with Nvidia uses Nvidia Nemotron open models and customer-controlled infrastructure, while Anthropic said on September 1 it would roll out Enterprise Frontier Safeguards later this fall, storing data in customer-controlled cloud infrastructure with zero-data-retention protections. Microsoft's Sovereign Private Cloud can run large AI models in fully disconnected, customer-controlled environments, a proposition it expanded with Mistral on July 21, though Microsoft also offers Anthropic models across Copilot and Foundry and says Anthropic models used in its online services are excluded from some in-country processing commitments and unavailable in certain sovereign-cloud environments. Palantir's second-quarter U.S. commercial revenue rose 149%, and Insider Monkey tracked 86 hedge funds long PLTR in the second quarter of 2026, down from 96 in the first quarter, while 273 hedge funds held reportable MSFT longs in the second quarter, down from 282. Short positioning is more pointed in Palantir, with 65.13 million shares sold short as of August 31, 3.00% of float, and 2.2 days to cover.