The Six Five Pod is back with Episode 291. Daniel Newman and Patrick Moorhead are fresh off trips to Davos and Abu Dhabi, where they've explored the full AI stack up close (models, infrastructure, healthcare/genomics). This episode dives into what really matters right now in the markets and tech. From Microsoft's Maia 200 inference push, to NVIDIA's $2B CoreWeave bet, OpenAI's Codex closing the coding gap, the "SaaSpocalypse" panic, Cisco's AI Summit, and a no-BS debate on whether AI agents are actually enterprise-ready.

The handpicked topics for this week are:

1. Inside Abu Dhabi's Full-Stack AI Play: From universities to healthcare to hyperscale infrastructure — Pat shares a firsthand perspective on how the UAE is quietly building an end-to-end AI ecosystem.

2. Optics, Cooling, and the Hidden AI Infrastructure Layer: Why companies like Coherent matter as much as GPUs — and how photonics, co-packaged optics, and rack-level cooling are becoming critical to scaling AI factories.

3. Inference Takes Center Stage: Microsoft's Maia 200 shows real progress — and why hyperscalers are building custom silicon to boost capacity, economics, and control.

4. NVIDIA's $2B CoreWeave Bet Circular finance or strategic genius? We unpack what NVIDIA's latest investment signals about AI factories, cloud capacity, and long-term infrastructure buildout.

5. Codex vs. Claude: The Coding Wars Heat Up: OpenAI closes the gap fast — and developers start hopping between tools as AI coding becomes a moving target.

6. The "SaaSpocalypse" Narrative: Is software really dead? We separate market panic from reality — and explain why SaaS won't disappear, but will never be valued the same again.

7. Cisco's AI Summit Reality Check: From hype to execution: what stood out from Cisco's AI Summit and why networking, security, and enterprise integration matter more than demos.

8. Are AI Agents Enterprise-Ready? The Flip Debates: real-world workflows vs. reliability, governance, and security — where agents work today, and where they still fall short.

Big Tech Earnings Whiplash: AWS, Google, Microsoft, Meta, NVIDIA, AMD, Palantir, and Coherent — massive CapEx, cloud acceleration, and what Wall Street is getting wrong about AI ROI.

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