Schneider Electric

Elastic Nominates Julia Liuson to Board

Elastic announced the nomination of Julia Liuson to its Board of Directors. Liuson is a veteran technology executive who most recently served as President of Microsoft’s Developer Division and played a leadership role in integrating AI into developer tools including work with GitHub. Her nomination is subject to shareholder approval at Elastic’s annual general meeting in October 2026; if elected she will join the company’s Compensation Committee. The release also notes that Caryn Marooney will not stand for re-appointment when her term expires in October 2026. Elastic positioned the nomination as adding AI and developer-platform expertise as the company pursues opportunities connecting AI applications and agents to enterprise data for observability and security use cases.

CISA: Hackers Hit 100+ U.S. Water Systems in July

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) reported that more than 100 internet-exposed systems in the U.S. water and wastewater sector were targeted by cyberattacks in July. The attacks largely targeted programmable logic controllers (PLCs) from multiple manufacturers — including Rockwell, Schneider Electric, and Siemens — and relied in part on AI tools to produce scripts capable of exploiting vulnerable PLCs. While the intrusions have caused outages and disruptions during investigations, they have had little effect on water supplies. U.S. officials say intelligence points to Iran as the likely actor but have not made a definitive attribution. The incidents raise broader concerns about the cybersecurity and resilience of U.S. critical infrastructure.

AI Funding Risks: Hedge Fund Collapse and Nvidia Financing

A recent rout in AI and chip stocks exposed fragilities in the AI funding boom, illustrated by Situational Awareness — a leveraged San Francisco hedge fund led by Leopold Aschenbrenner — which sold its public stock portfolio to Citadel after margin calls created a liquidity crisis. The piece flags vendor financing risks as Nvidia has made large, hardware-linked investments and commitments (including a reported $5 billion commitment to Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence and reported talks to guarantee up to $250 billion for OpenAI). Corporate venture capital and new financial actors (big managers and private credit) now dominate AI financing, while special purpose vehicles (SPVs) are outpacing direct secondary trades on some platforms, underscoring evolving—and potentially systemic—financing risks for the AI buildout.