Welcome to CTRL: Alt Cloud, a new newsletter from The Stack diving into the Wild West of alternative clouds, the workloads they keep running, and the silicon they run on…
This week the hyperscalers have proven the AI buildout is not going anywhere, with Google and Microsoft reporting barn-storming earnings bolstered by their cloud and infrastructure businesses.
The money train chugged along happily with Marvell, an American chip company focused on integrated circuits and data infrastructure, spending $115 billion in an all-stock deal for Lumentum. In the biggest tech acquisition ever, at least that didn’t involve Elon Musk, Marvell is betting that Lumentum’s optical components can speed up how data packets move between servers.
On the other side of the tracks, the neoclouds are scrapping amongst themselves. Railway, a the engineering-focused cloud provider, was hacked in October and this week its employees are the ones doing the hacking.
Both featured stories are, in their own way, about what happens when something outruns its guardrails: an AI agent that took “agentic testing” rather too literally, and a chipmaker cutting deals that analysts fear may mark the top of the cycle.
On The Stack’s further reading list: Google Cloud doubled revenue, Microsoft put a dollar figure on Azure for the first time, …
Red team, wrong target
Two weeks after disclosing a “sustained and targeted” breach that may have touched 100,000 accounts, Railway found itself on the other end of an incident report.
Per Primcloud founder Josh Manders, a Railway employee "pulled credentials from inside their app's container and used them to request every secret on the platform: ours and every other customer's."
They hit the cloud provider’s metadata endpoint, guessed at internal database names and port-scanned all 65,536 internal addresses, Manders said.
Nothing was accessed, but Manders called out Railway publicly. The culprit, a senior product engineer at the engineering-forward cloud called Jake Runzer, owned up quickly. Runzer said had been running agents to do sign-ups and “agentic testing” on rival platforms, and halted the harness when it went “off the rails and reaching too far.”
Railway founder Jake Cooper framed it as a personal bug-bounty tool, built off the clock, run once on a hosted Deepseek service and killed within 15 minutes. “We create an environment where internal red teaming has strict guidelines,” he said.
Unauthorised access is a crime on both sides of the Atlantic; Railway says that it has taken “appropriate action.”
Iain Thomson
Marvell bets the party is just getting started
Lumentum makes the optical networking components that keep data moving across server clusters. This is a technical bottleneck for AI workloads in conventional data centres. Marvell is betting that the industry is moving from discrete modules to tightly co-designed electrical-optical systems, and that pairing its accelerators with Lumentum’s optics lets operators serve both training and inference.
Investors were less sure, sending Marvell shares down more than 12% on Monday. Power constraints, local opposition and softer-than-forecast capex from Microsoft and Google have the market spooked. Every computing era has produced at least one mega-deal that, in hindsight, called the top of the cycle. Marvell may have nominated itself.
Tom Krazit
What we’re reading this week…
- Google Cloud doubled revenue on AI momentum and reported $30.7 billion in Q3 revenue, up 103%, with a $561 billion backlog.
- Microsoft offered buyouts to 60,000 staff, in the same week it reported Microsoft Azure revenue surges 48% to $33 billion.
- AWS tested its European Sovereign Cloud could operate completely disconnected from US infrastructure.
This newsletter is brought to your inboxes weekly thanks to the sponsorship of Datum, the modern cloud alternative to CDNs and complex networks for AI companies.
