AWS, Oracle and AIB: Top Tech News this Week
AWS Invests US$1bn in New Forward Deployed Engineering Firm
AWS has launched a new Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) organisation backed by a US$1bn investment, as enterprises face mounting pressure to integrate AI into their core operations.
The initiative represents a shift in how cloud providers support businesses attempting to transition to AI-native models.
As organisations move beyond experimental AI projects towards production-ready agentic AI systems, many are finding the transformation more complex than anticipated.
AWS’ new approach places experienced engineers directly within customer teams, moving away from traditional consulting arrangements to help build, deploy and scale AI solutions designed for specific business requirements.
Francesca Vasquez, Vice President of Frontier AI Engineering and Services at AWS, outlines the rationale: “Customers have moved past exploring what AI can do; they want to make it core to how they operate.
Oracle Adds 10 Startups to Ecosystem for Better US Defence
Ten new defence technology companies have joined the Oracle Defense Ecosystem, a global initiative designed to improve defence and government technology in the US and its allies.
The initiative was first announced in June 2025 at the Oracle Defense Tech Summit to provide the latest cloud and AI technologies from its initial members, including Arqit, Blackshark.ai, Entanglement, Fenix Group (now part of Nokia Federal Solutions), Koniku, Kraken, Mattermost, Metron, SensusQ and Whitespace.
âOracle and our defence ecosystem plans to innovate and scale to help the US and its allies deter conflicts and win on physical and digital battlefields,â said Rand Waldron, Vice President of Sovereign Regions at Oracle, last year.
How AIB Builds Trust through Tech, Security and its New App
Allied Irish Banks (AIB) is currently coming to the end of a three-year strategic cycle focused on elevating its overall digital literacy – not just in AI, but across data and broader digital capabilities.
When Graham Fagan stepped into the Group Chief Technology Officer role at the beginning of this cycle in 2023, technologies like generative AI were not yet at the forefront of the industry’s mind.
Since then, he has taken on a combined role to include Group Chief Operating Officer.
“There’s been a lot done,” he says. “It’s been a very interesting journey.”
From Aadhaar to JuliaHub: Viral Shah’s Computing Revolution
For Viral Shah, Co-Founder and CEO of JuliaHub, life’s work has always been defined by a singular drive: solving massive, complex problems that create real-world impact at scale.
Early in his career, Viral witnessed the transformative power of foundational technology first hand while developing the computational infrastructure for India’s Aadhaar programme, an identity project scaling to over a billion people.
It was this same obsession with scale and efficiency that drove him to co-create the Julia programming language, solving the notorious “two-language problem” and revolutionising technical computing for more than a million global users.
Today, under his leadership, JuliaHub is leveraging world-class compiler expertise to tackle some of the planet’s most urgent challenges – from climate change and electrification to the semiconductor shortage.
New NVIDIA Halos Tech Secures Agility Humanoid Robots
The era of physical AI is rapidly materialising on the factory floor but scaling these autonomous systems requires a unified approach to safety.
Addressing this critical need, NVIDIA has announced NVIDIA Halos for Robotics, which it calls the industry’s first full-stack, comprehensive safety system for robotics and physical AI that unifies AI compute and safety.
Originally developed as an autonomous vehicle safety system that brings together vehicle architecture, AI models, chips, software, tools and services, NVIDIA is extending the technology to humanoid robotics.
Deepu Talla, Vice President of Robotics and Edge AI at NVIDIA, explains: “Physical AI is transforming how factories, warehouses and logistics operations work and robotics teams need a unified safety architecture to scale autonomous systems into these environments.”
