Topic
Total corporate spending on AI infrastructure like data centers and chips, tracked for its rapid growth and scrutiny over returns.
World Bank forecasters lifted East Asia and Pacific growth to 4.5% this year, up 0.3 points, mostly on AI hardware exports from Vietnam, Malaysia and Thailand. Those gains now depend on global AI spending, and the lender lists a correction there as a key downside risk.
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Semiconductor exports and chip investment took the OECD's 2026 forecast for South Korea from 1.7% in March to 3.7%, the largest upgrade in the G20. Korea's own institutions sit half a point lower, at 3.2%.
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AI infrastructure spending moved the OECD's 2026 global growth forecast from 2.8% to 2.9%, while the body says energy turmoil, bond yields, weak AI returns and extreme weather hitting together would cost 0.7 points of 2027 growth.
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Alibaba says the Zhenwu V900 trebles the performance of its previous accelerator and can run in clusters of up to 500,000 units. The supply question behind those clusters went unanswered at the launch.
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The founder of the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity worries more about incomes at the bottom than about uncertain returns on AI, and the data that would confirm him sits in private credit books.
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Berkshire put $39.4bn into equities in the first half of 2026 against $7.1bn a year earlier. On September 18 the chairmanship passed to Howard Buffett, whose remit his father defined as guarding the culture.
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A column on en.sedaily.com puts four US hyperscalers at as much as $760 billion of capital spending this year, up from $412.5 billion between them in 2025. It takes the dot-com burst as evidence the hardware outlives the money.
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Michigan's package is $16.3bn anchored by PIMCO, Texas and Wisconsin about $38bn, New Mexico $18bn. Against a target of up to 10 gigawatts, the named money works out at roughly $7.2bn per gigawatt. The suppliers bill on megawatts energised.
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Fortune reports that Capgemini has agreed to sell the American subsidiary that supplied tracing and removal data to ICE while its shares slide with the AI trade. The chief executive's only statement on spending pace is seven months old.
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The 10-year yield went from 4% to 5% this year while inflation went from 2.4% to 3.4%, leaving the gap where it started. Stocks are up double digits anyway, and earnings have grown faster than prices, so valuations fell.
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Dario Amodei's slowdown essay and Sam Altman's remark that a listing would be ill-advised took ASML down 6%, about EUR 33.6 billion of market value, while Nvidia fell 2.5% and TSMC 1.2%. The drops grew with distance from current revenue.
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The Justice Department told a New York federal court that licensing would make a robust AI industry harder to build. Vivek Shah, whose company is a plaintiff, answers with OpenAI's own compute forecast and the music industry's royalty bill.
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Lenders are charging the independent operators and joint ventures that build datacentres a premium the hyperscalers avoid, and close to $500bn of AI debt is due to price into that market in 2026.
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Cryptopolitan, citing The Information, says sites in Tennessee and Mississippi ran for months without backup power, and Google can trim payments proportionally if about 110,000 GPUs miss a September 30 handover.
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DeFiLlama now marks the two labs at $2.28 trillion against an implied $544 billion a year ago, which leaves every bank pitching an AI listing to price against a reference no public order book has tested.
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Hyperscalers absorb about two-thirds of AI outlay, so rack-scale kit is now packaged for sovereign clouds, neoclouds and enterprises that cannot staff a GPU fabric team.
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A Pearl Meyer survey of 116 leaders finds accountability for AI looks clearest to the people furthest from the work, at a moment when Gartner puts this year's AI spend at $2.5 trillion.
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