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A $435 million all-cash acquisition doesn’t happen just to add another logo to a portfolio. We break down why Lumen is buying Alkira to become the control plane for cloud connectivity, and what that signals about where multicloud networking is headed. Alkira’s POP-based backbone and marketplace approach made cloud interconnect feel like a service. Plug that into a telco-sized footprint and you can imagine faster turn-ups, better orchestration, and smarter last-mile connectivity. You can also imagine a lot of painful integration work and real uncertainty for current Alkira customers.

Then we pivot to something every engineering leader should be thinking about: what happens when your team depends on AI coding tools and the quality quietly drops. Anthropic’s Claude Code post-mortem is refreshingly candid, but it raises the bigger question we can’t ignore anymore: what’s the service level agreement for model “reasoning,” coding intelligence, and reliability, and what recourse exists when the output isn’t what you paid for?

We also cover a new wave of supply chain attacks, where compromised packages can ride trusted pipelines, hunt for AI and cloud credentials in local dev directories, and self-replicate fast. And we end with the physical side of the cloud: a data center water controversy that shows why communities are pushing back as AI infrastructure scales.

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