AI Infrastructure Newsletter

The scale-up of AI infrastructure is accelerating worldwide, with the U.S., Asia, and Europe each marking major moves. In America, OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank have unveiled five new Stargate data center sites — pushing planned capacity to nearly 7GW and over $400 billion in committed investment, ahead of schedule.

The AI infrastructure race shows no sign of slowing. Ciena announced a $270 million acquisition of Nubis Communications to strengthen optical and copper interconnects for data center AI workloads.

A new front in the U.S.-China AI race sees Alibaba and Baidu accelerating adoption of homegrown processors, easing dependence on Nvidia as U.S. export curbs and Beijing’s policy push narrow the performance gap.

AI’s infrastructure era has arrived, demanding chips, cooling, capital — and unprecedented levels of coordination. It’s shocking just how quickly the AI infrastructure ecosystem is scaling, and how much is at stake.

The race to scale AI capacity is moving fast across Europe, with the U.K. and Norway emerging as new hubs and U.S. chipmakers drawing fresh bets from rivals.

Enterprises may be racing to adopt AI, but the challenges are coming into sharper focus as risks and real-world consequences surface.There are some weird, wild and very personal questions that businesses have to ask themselves — for instance, should customers be allowed to have deep or romantic relationships with company chatbots?

China announced a ban on Nvidia’s custom RTX Pro 6000D chips for the Chinese market, marking a turning point in the race for AI dominance: Faced with being cut off or restricted from U.S. advanced chip supplies, Beijing would rather turn to its domestic alternatives, so it is forcing tech giants like Alibaba and ByteDance to pivot from reliance on U.S. semiconductors.

If the AI boom were a theme park, Nvidia has made a second deal for fast-pass access to compute capacity — first through a $1.5 billion agreement with AI cloud provider Lambda for Nvidia to lease back up to 18,000 of its own GPUs, and now a deal with CoreWeave for up to $6.3 billion worth of access to unused data center capacity, putting Nvidia at the front of the line.

Talk about large-scale: Yesterday, Alphabet became the fourth company ever to reach a $3 trillion market value, joining Nvidia, Microsoft, and Apple. It’s no coincidence that so much of their valuations are driven by investors’ enthusiasm for all things AI.

The pace of investment in AI infrastructure is accelerating worldwide, with billions pouring into new ventures, massive cloud agreements, and record levels of data center construction.