#ai-infrastructure

#ai-infrastructure

A looming shortage of electrical power is set to constrain datacenter expansion, potentially leaving many industry growth forecasts looking overly optimistic. In its latest report, " Five Predictions for 2026," Uptime Institute says that power will become the defining constraint on datacenter growth in 2026 and beyond. This is because it simply isn't possible to add extra grid and generating capacity at the same rate as new server farms are popping up, so something is going to have to give.

"Some have suggested that AI will be so beneficial that the public should help pay for the added electricity the country needs for it ... but we disagree with this approach," he continued. "Especially when tech companies are so profitable, we believe that it's both unfair and politically unrealistic for our industry to ask the public to shoulder added electricity costs for AI. Instead, we believe the long-term success of AI infrastructure requires that tech companies pay their own way for the electricity costs they create."

Despite the past year's stock market volatility, the explosive demand for semiconductors and microchips that has grabbed news headlines and led the market higher over the past few years remains. As the drive toward integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into our everyday lives progresses, a handful of mega-cap companies are capable of meeting that demand. While Nvidia Corp. ( NASDAQ: NVDA) may get the lion's share of attention, companies like Broadcom Inc. ( NASDAQ: AVGO) will also be playing a central role in supply.

Among the bigger news items was Google's launch of an e-commerce shopping checkout feature directly from Google Search's AI Mode and its Gemini chatbot app. Among the first takers for the new feature is retail behemoth Walmart, so this is a big deal. Behind the scenes, the AI checkout is powered by a new " Universal Commerce Protocol" that should make it easier for retailers to support agentic AI sales.

December 2025 closed out a transformative year for artificial intelligence with a flurry of major model releases, significant policy shifts, and massive infrastructure investments. OpenAI and Google went head-to-head with their latest flagship models, the open-source community delivered a stunning array of competitive alternatives, and Apple quietly enabled a new era of local AI clustering. Meanwhile, the US government stepped in to create a national AI policy framework, and the race to build out the physical infrastructure for AI reached a fever pitch. 🚀

Zuckerberg said that Meta's head of global engineering Santosh Janardhan will lead the "top-level initiative" and that recent hire and former Safe Superintelligence CEO Daniel Gross will "lead a new group responsible for long-term capacity strategy, supplier partnerships, industry analysis, planning, and business modeling." McCormick is expected to "work on partnering with governments and sovereigns to build, deploy, invest in, and finance Meta's infrastructure."

iShares Global Clean Energy ETF ( NYSEARCA:ICLN) delivered a 49% return over the past year, nearly tripling the S&P 500's 18% gain. The fund tracks approximately 100 global companies in renewable energy, utilities, and clean technology. With $1.9 billion in assets and a 0.39% expense ratio, ICLN provides broad exposure to solar, wind, fuel cells, and electric utilities positioned to benefit from surging power demand.

IGPT delivers aggressive growth through concentrated AI exposure. With 72% of assets in information technology and communication services, this is a pure-play thematic fund. The ETF holds roughly 115 positions, but the top 10 represent 62% of assets. IGPT overweights companies directly building or deploying AI systems rather than those tangentially benefiting from the trend.

"The result will be a shortfall of 10 million tons that represents a "systemic risk for global industries, technological advancement and economic growth," the report said."

Snowflake is planning to acquire AI-based site reliability engineer (SRE) platform provider Observe to strengthen observability capabilities across its offerings and help enterprises with AIOps as they accelerate AI pilots into production. Longer term, Snowflake is positioning itself as infrastructure for AI at scale. As AI agents generate exponentially more data, vertically integrated data and observability platforms become essential to running production AI reliably and economically,

Memory prices are set to spike again as chipmakers prioritize AI server production over consumer devices, with analysts warning of a high double-digit jump in Q1 2026 alone as demand outpaces supply. Samsung Electronics and SK hynix are reportedly planning to raise server memory prices by up to 70 percent this quarter, according to Korea Economic Daily. Combined with 50 percent increases in 2025, this could nearly double prices by mid-2026.

The Roundhill Generative AI & Technology ETF ( NYSEARCA:CHAT) soared just over 45% in 2025, outpacing the S&P 500's 17% gain and the Nasdaq-100's 21% advance. The fund's 2026 performance trajectory depends on hyperscaler spending on AI infrastructure and the fund's concentrated exposure to companies building that infrastructure. Hyperscaler Capital Spending Is the Engine The biggest macro factor affecting CHAT's performance is capital expenditure by the world's largest cloud providers.

SoftBank said it will acquire digital infrastructure investor DigitalBridge for about $4 billion. The Japanese conglomerate said it is doubling down on building the data centers, connectivity, and power needed to support AI at a global scale. "As AI transforms industries worldwide, we need more compute, connectivity, power, and scalable infrastructure," said Masayoshi Son, chairman and CEO of SoftBank Group. The deal underscores SoftBank's push to control more of the physical infrastructure behind AI as competition for computing resources intensifies.

There are few certainties in life: death, taxes and massively increased workloads on infrastructures through the unstoppable rise of AI. And enterprises and connectivity providers know only too well that AI has fuelled an unprecedented surge in network demand. Keeping pace with the next wave of AI growth will require new long-haul networks to enable the rapid scaling of capacity needs in both existing and emerging enterprise setups - especially within datacentres.

As memory prices continue to rise, it is time engineers reconsidered their applications and toolchains' voracious appetite for memory. Does a simple web page really need megabytes to show a user the modern equivalent of Hello World? Today's Windows Task Manager executable occupies 6 MB of disk space. It demands almost 70 MB before it will show a user just how much of a memory hog Chrome is these days. The original weighs in at 85 KB on disk.

Magnificent Seven stocks have been some of the most successful growth stocks and make up a large portion of the S&P 500. However, all of those same stocks have valuations above $1 trillion, which makes it harder for those same stocks to double, triple, or 10x from current levels. That's why some investors are seeking smaller growth stocks that are posting impressive revenue growth. These stocks have the potential to outperform the Magnificent Seven stocks

The company will merge with TAE Technologies-a privately held fusion energy firm that's backed by Alphabet, Chevron Technology Ventures, and others-in a deal that's worth more than $6 billion. It's an all-stock deal, which is expected to close sometime next year, and is a huge and eyebrow-raising move for Trump Media, which is best known as the owner of President Trump's social media platform, Truth Social.

It was never clearer that the world you and I grew up in no longer exists than on a hot, arid summer afternoon in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in May of this year. The oil-rich Saudis, keen to jump into the AI arms race, had invited all the tech and business elites who will decide the future of mankind to an investment forum in the desert.