Month in Review: Meta Bets Big While OpenAI Stumbles Through a Clumsy Month

August brought some exciting releases and partnerships – a few met with applause while several others raised eyebrows. At emma, we zeroed in on strategies that matter most right now: curbing rising cloud costs, navigating geopolitical shifts, and finally breaking free from lingering technical debt.

So, here’s your quick round-up of the latest from emma and cloud developments every tech and cloud leader should be watching:

In the Spotlight: Mega Deals & Subtle Market Shifts

OpenAI faces a turbulent month despite major launches

The much-anticipated GPT-5 finally dropped and was met with immediate and significant backlash from a large portion of its user base. Surprisingly, the biggest source of outrage was the abrupt removal of GPT-4o and ChatGPT-5’s apparent lack of personality and warmth. For many, it’s unsettling how deeply people are beginning to connect with AI. 

On the performance side, the model’s narrow gains in specific benchmarks have also sparked concerns about a looming AI plateau. (Read more) 

In other news, OpenAI also dropped gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b – OpenAI’s biggest open-weights release since GPT-2. The launch marked OpenAI’s first official link-up with AWS, a notable step as the company diversifies beyond its deep Microsoft ties. (Read more)

After OpenAI, Meta inks over $10 billion cloud deal with Google

Meta Platforms has signed a six-year agreement with Google, committing more than $10 billion to leverage Google Cloud’s infrastructure – including servers, storage, and networking – for its AI and cloud computing needs. (Read more)

The White House gets $1 billion AWS credits until 2028

The credits will support federal agencies in cloud adoption, IT modernization, training, and AI initiatives as part of the White House’s push to centralize procurement and cut costs.

And this isn’t a one-off, as the ongoing wave of hyperscaler deals include steep discounts on OpenAI’s ChatGPT Enterprise, DocuSign, Adobe, and OCI. GCP is also reportedly lining up similar offers, all with the goal to win major contracts and long-term strategic influence.  (Read more)

Neocloud challengers are gaining ground with Nvidia-backed infra

“Neocloud” providers like CoreWeave, Nebius, and Gcore offer specialized, high-performance infrastructure built for AI and HPC. They deliver GPU density, low-latency networking, and flexible consumption models that hyperscalers often can’t match. (Read more)

For organizations chasing both reliability and speed of innovation, pairing hyperscalers with neoclouds means getting the best of both worlds: service range, resilience, cost efficiency, and performance.

Essential Resource: The State of IaC 2025

IaC was supposed to bring order through automation and standardization. Instead, it’s introducing sprawl, drift, and complexity across platforms and teams.

If you’ve ever felt like your team’s the only one doing it wrong, here’s the reality check:

• 89% of orgs have adopted Infrastructure as Code.
• But only 6% have codified 100% of their infrastructure.

This means, most teams are inevitably fighting drift and struggling to reconcile resources across cloud consoles and IaC tools. 

Solution? Here’s what provisioning should look like in 2025: The Best Way to Provision VMs (No snowflakes, no silos)

Cloud Strategy Focus: Cost Optimization, Repatriation, and Sovereignty

• “Repatriation” is set to be one of 2026’s buzzwords. It’s gaining steam as enterprises push back against runaway cloud bills and rising compliance demands. But don’t buy the hype of full exits. Most moves are hybrid shifts, not abandonments. (Read More)

• Hyperscalers won’t pack up their EU datacenters overnight. Still, the push for cloud sovereignty and vendor independence is strong, driven less by immediate “kill-switch” fears and more by the EU’s uneasiness over shifting geopolitical realities. In any case, interest in homegrown cloud infrastructure is rising, and that shift is worth watching closely. (Read More)

• Gartner reports that nearly half of executives expect budget cuts, but outperformers stand out by reallocating spend toward growth, embedding cost discipline in every decision, and doubling down on automation and AI for efficiency. (Read More)

Cloud costs are the least predictable line item today, and emma has been helping organizations apply Gartner’s strategies to manage cloud resources while building resilience through operational flexibility.

Tech Debt: How to Actually Pay it Off

Last month’s deep dive on what technical debt is and why it holds teams back struck a chord with so many of you. This month, we're taking the conversation from theory to practice. You’ll find a proven, step-by-step framework to do more than just acknowledge debt. Using this guide, you can track your tech debt, prioritize fixes, and visibly turn awareness into progress. (Read more)

Need help implementing the steps? Book a consultation with our seasoned engineers. 

emma’s Feature Spotlight: Super Fast VM Provisioning

With emma, you can spin up VMs across any cloud in just minutes: fully configured, network-connected, policy-compliant, and cost-optimized.

All you do is pick your specs – provider, region, vCPUs, memory, and storage type – and emma handles the rest behind the scenes. No console juggling, no state drift – just consistent, reliable provisioning. 

Curious how it works? Check out our step-by-step guide: How to Deploy Virtual Machines with emma

And that’s a wrap…

Thanks for reading! Got thoughts, tips, or a piece of cloud news we missed? Comment below to let us know. 

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