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July 2026 in enterprise technology: sovereign AI, inference money and the VMware exit
In short
July 2026 was about control and capital: enterprises demanded say over where AI runs, investors poured money into inference hardware, SASE consolidation kept growing, and more service providers mapped their route off VMware.
Sovereign AI becomes a boardroom issue
- DataRobot argued that sovereign AI has moved from a government concern to a boardroom one, and earlier in the month pitched unified AI governance beyond a single cloud.
- In Europe, Scaleway acquired Qarnot for low-carbon HPC and won a "Trusted Cloud" contract with Airbus.
Money follows inference
- SambaNova reached an $11B valuation, one of several large AI infrastructure rounds that month (the week's biggest funding rounds).
- AMD set out full-stack compute for agentic AI.
Networks and security converge
- Cato Networks passed $415M in ARR with 42% year-on-year growth and was named a Leader in Gartner's SASE Magic Quadrant for a third year.
The VMware exit gets practical
- Platform9 published how Meriplex, a CRN MSP 500 provider, found its VMware exit after changes to Broadcom's partner programme.
- Mirantis showed how to bake Cilium networking into k0rdent cluster templates.
AI-written code needs guardrails
- Portainer's guides on vibe coding security and enterprise vibe coding practices cite studies finding 40–62% of AI-generated code ships with a vulnerability.
- Checkly asked whether CLIs really are more token-efficient than MCP, and Sourcegraph explained how to evaluate code search on your own codebase.
What to watch in August
Q2 earnings from infrastructure vendors, more inference-hardware deals, and whether sovereign-AI promises turn into contract terms. Discuss any of these in the community.
Have you worked with this?
The story is what was announced. Nobody has discussed it yet, so if it touches your team, a short post about what you’ve seen helps the next reader.