#ai-infrastructure

#ai-infrastructure

Palantir Technologies ( ) has ridden the artificial intelligence (AI) wave with relentless force through 2025, delivering data analytics platforms that governments and enterprises can't get enough of. While Nvidia ( NASDAQ:NVDA ) has faltered amid chip supply shortages and valuation jitters, Palantir's momentum shows no signs of slowing - its shares climbed nearly 123% this year. It's one of the S&P 500's top performers, a testament to AI's sticky demand for actionable insights.

Companies supplying data centers, chips, and "compute" processing power to OpenAI have taken on about $96 billion in debt to fund their operations, according to an analysis by the Financial Times. The news highlights the AI sector's increasing reliance on debt and its growing dependence on loss-making AI startup OpenAI in particular.Currently, the revenues being generated by AI companies and many of the data center operators that are rapidly expanding in order to serve them, are nowhere near big enough to cover their build-out costs.

Partners Group, a Swiss private equity and real estate biz which bought atNorth in 2021, is understood to be seeking between €4 billion ($4.6 billion) and €4.5 billion ($5.2 billion), according to Bloomberg and the FT. Now the bidders keen to snatch up the business are reported to include two of the largest multinational datacenter operators, Digital Realty and Equinix. Equinix is working with investors Canada Pension Plan Investment Board.

Over the past two years, Amazon ( NASDAQ:AMZN ), Alphabet ( NASDAQ:GOOG )( NASDAQ:GOOGL ), and Microsoft ( NASDAQ:MSFT ) have collectively committed nearly $3 trillion to AI infrastructure. Microsoft alone plans $80 billion in fiscal 2025 capex, mostly data centers; Alphabet raised its 2025 guidance to $75 billion; and Amazon's AWS is on pace for $100+ billion annually by 2026. The stated goal: lock in dominance before rivals do. Wall Street cheers every upward revision, sending these stocks to repeated all-time highs.

Red Hat is positioning its open-source platform as the foundation for companies navigating AI adoption and digital sovereignty. In a recent interview with Techzine, Chief Product Officer Ashesh Badani explained how the over-25-year-old open-source philosophy now applies to the AI era, where choice and control matter more than ever. Red Hat has built its business on open source for over two decades. That philosophy now extends to artificial intelligence, where companies face new challenges.

Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son stood next to President Trump, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) founder Larry Ellison when they announced the Stargate project in January. The plan was to invest $500 billion in data centers. Last month, Son upped its company's investment in OpenAI to $30 billion. He sold all of Softbank's Nvidia ( NASDAQ: NVDA) share ownership for $5.83 billion to help pay for that decision.

SoftBank Group confirmed on Wednesday that it has completed its acquisition of Ampere Computing. Through its subsidiary Silver Bands 6 (US) Corp., the group has acquired all shares in the American semiconductor company. The transaction, valued at $6.5 billion, was announced in March and has now been fully completed. Ampere will become a wholly owned subsidiary of SoftBank and will continue to operate under its own name.

Vahdat, a vice president at Google Cloud, presented slides showing the company needs to scale "the next 1000x in 4-5 years." While a thousandfold increase in compute capacity sounds ambitious by itself, Vahdat noted some key constraints: Google needs to be able to deliver this increase in capability, compute, and storage networking "for essentially the same cost and increasingly, the same power, the same energy level," he told employees during the meeting.

Amazon recently issued $15 billion in debt, including a rare 40-year bond, and saw demand approach $80 billion - more than five times oversubscribed . Investors accepted yields only about 80 basis points above comparable U.S. Treasuries, effectively treating Amazon as quasi-sovereign credit despite the long maturity. This level of demand is extraordinary for a private company raising funds for aggressive capital expenditures.

But it's a laboratory, hidden away at the back of the campus behind some trees, that he is most excited for me to see. This is where the invention that Google believes is its secret weapon is being developed. Known as a Tensor Processing Unit (or TPU), it looks like an unassuming little chip but, says Mr Pichai, it will one day power every AI query that goes through Google. This makes it potentially one of the most important objects in the world economy

"Delivering high-performance global AI infrastructure at scale requires strong partnerships," said AMD CEO Lisa Su.

Even as the investing world continues to debate whether we are or are not in an "AI bubble," there shouldn't be any question whether AI-driven dividend stocks are still enjoying a moment. As artificial intelligence dominates much of the daily conversation in the tech world, these stocks and their shareholders are all enjoying outstanding returns. The good news is that not every AI-driven dividend stock is under the microscope as part of the bubble.

"Research from Microsoft suggests AI represents a £550 billion opportunity for the UK over the next decade," she said.

The forecasts are eye-popping: utilities saying they'll need two or three times more electricity within a few years to power massive new data centers that are feeding a fast-growing AI economy. But the challenges - some say the impossibility - of building new power plants to meet that demand so quickly has set off alarm bells for lawmakers, policymakers and regulators who wonder if those utility forecasts can be trusted.

More recently, Lumen partnered with IBM to unlock scalable AI for businesses, as well as with Google Cloud to provide advanced cloud and network solutions to meet the growing demands of AI workloads. Lumen strengthened its financial position and freed up capital for long-term growth by refinancing its term loans, as well as selling off its fiber-to-the-home business to AT&T.

Bitfarms, one of North America's largest Bitcoin miners, announced it will gradually wind down its mining operations over the next two years. The company plans to shift its focus to high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure. The move reflects a broader trend among crypto miners. Falling Bitcoin prices and shrinking profit margins are pushing operators to explore more stable revenue streams.

The European colocation market is plugging the demand gaps for datacentre capacity caused by the waning appetites of hyperscale cloud firms by cozying up to neocloud providers, research from CBRE shows. The real estate consultancy's third quarter look at the state of the European datacentre market reveals that, despite a drop-off in hyperscaler demand for colocation capacity, the amount being acquired for hosting artificial intelligence (AI) workloads has soared.

More than sixty years after the HDD was invented, this fundamentally outdated technology still proves to be sufficiently suitable for modern applications. Let there be no doubt: the use of hard drives for AI is anything but obvious. In a domain where the lowest latency is required, HDD speeds are often ten times slower than those of SSDs. But to run AI models, HBM memory is needed that is placed directly next to the chip.

The company exceeded expectations last quarter with revenue of $14.67 billion and EPS of $0.99, as AI infrastructure orders more than doubled its prior-year target. CEO Chuck Robbins said the company has "established a solid foundation" for its strongest year yet, driven by record webscale orders, early enterprise AI deployments, and refreshed product lines built around its Silicon One platform.

AI remains one of Intel's highest strategic priorities, and we are focused on executing our technology and product road map across emerging AI workloads, the company said in the statement.

What's lifting growth now isn't consumer demand: it's infrastructure. From data centers and chip foundries to electric utilities and fiber cabling, billions are being poured into the AI ecosystem. Companies like Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) are selling record volumes of GPUs, while utilities expand capacity to power the next wave of computing. That spending circulates across the economy: construction, logistics, real estate, and materials, creating a multiplier effect reminiscent of the early internet years.