Lakehouse & AI News: Feb 13-Feb 19

This week on The Data, Lakehouse and AI Show, we cover one of the biggest weeks in the Apache lakehouse ecosystem in recent memory. Apache Polaris officially graduated to a Top-Level Apache Project — a milestone that signals just how central open catalog infrastructure has become to the modern data stack. We break down what graduation means, why it matters for Iceberg users, and what's next for the project.On the Iceberg side, the 1.11.0 release is imminent with Spark 4.1 support, geo predicates, REST scan planning, and the long-awaited drop of Java 11. We also dive into the active Bloom skipping index sync and the growing conversation around efficient column updates for wide-table AI/ML workloads.In chipset news, Meta and NVIDIA announced a landmark multiyear partnership — including the first large-scale deployment of NVIDIA Grace standalone CPUs — and Jensen Huang has teased a mystery chip announcement at GTC 2026 on March 16th. We'll be watching closely.On the tools front, Apple dropped Xcode 26.3 with Claude Agent and OpenAI Codex baked in, OpenAI released GPT-5.2-Codex for long-horizon agentic coding, and the Anthropic 2026 Agentic Coding Trends Report confirms we're firmly in the multi-agent era.Plus: Apache Arrow 23.0.1 shipped, Arrow Rust v58 is in RC, and we share a practical data modeling tip on using Iceberg's Partition Evolution to avoid costly table rewrites as your query patterns change.