#ai-infrastructure

#ai-infrastructure

Bill Ackman's Pershing Square Capital made a significant portfolio shift, selling its entire stake in Chipotle Mexican Grill (NYSE:CMG) and taking a new position in Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META | META Price Prediction), marking a rotation from consumer discretionary into AI infrastructure. The Trade That Turned Heads Ackman's firm exited Chipotle along with positions in Nike (NYSE:NKE) and Hilton (NYSE:HLT), while simultaneously investing in Meta Platforms, Amazon.com, and Hertz Global Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ:HTZ).

Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Jensen Huang, and Michael Dell saw a combined $26 billion wiped off their net worths in one day, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index shows. Their fortunes shrank because their respective stakes in Tesla, Meta, Amazon, Nvidia, and Dell slid in value. The stock prices of those first four companies fell by around 2% on Thursday, as investors grew increasingly concerned about the immense costs of building out AI infrastructure and whether they'd see a return on their spending.

Big Tech companies and their suppliers are expected to invest almost $700 billion in AI infrastructure this year and are increasingly turning to the debt markets to finance the giant data centre build-out. Alphabet in November sold $17.5 billion of bonds in the US including a 50-year bond-the longest-dated dollar bond sold by a tech group last year-and raised €6.5 billion on European markets. Oracle last week raised $25 billion from a bond sale that attracted more than $125 billion of orders.

A small group of prominent tech companies had been handing money to each other for some time. The best summary was visual: Bloomberg clearly showed the circular flow of finances between Nvidia, AMD, Oracle, OpenAI, CoreWeave, and others. In the case of the Nvidia-OpenAI deal, the $100 billion investment would benefit new AI infrastructure, mostly filled with Nvidia hardware, which in turn would be paid for with that investment money.

"We're growing at really an unprecedented rate. Yet, I think every provider would tell you, including us, that we could actually grow faster if we had all the supply that we could take," he said on the company's Thursday earnings call. "And so we are being incredibly scrappy around that. If you look in the last 12 months, we added 3.9 gigawatts of power. Just for perspective, that's twice what we had in 2022....We expect to double it again by the end of 2027."

Enterprises and cloud providers alike are opening their wallets for AI-related hardware and software, with data center systems leading the charge, according to the research firm. "AI infrastructure growth remains rapid despite concerns about an AI bubble, with spending rising across AI‑related hardware and software," John-David Lovelock, distinguished VP analyst at Gartner said in the report. "Demand from hyperscale cloud providers continues to drive investment in servers optimized for AI workloads."

Google's latest quarterly report provided further evidence that its internet empire is withstanding an artificial intelligence shakeup that's turning into another potential boon for the company.

AutoDS was bootstrapped and eventually reached 1.8 million users, generated more than $1 billion in user revenue, and exited successfully to Fiverr. From its earliest days, the company was fast moving, the kind of place where speed was strategic and rapid implementation felt like the natural way to operate. But as Pozin's team moved from pilots to production, they learned that speed alone was not enough. AI only delivers results when the right data foundations and ownership structures are in place.

As investors turned their back on software (notably, the seat-based software-as-a-service companies), they're turned towards hardware in a big-time way. You wouldn't know it by looking at those flat shares of Nvidia ( NASDAQ:NVDA), but the iShares Semiconductor ETF ( NASDAQ:SOXX) is up around 13% year to date, with few signs of slowing down. The winners within semis have been broad, but the undisputed kings of the 2026 semiconductor surge belongs to the memory and storage stocks.

It's a goal that Musk suggested in his announcement of the deal could become easier to reach with a combined company. "In the long term, space-based AI is obviously the only way to scale," Musk wrote on SpaceX's website Monday, then added in reference to solar power, "It's always sunny in space!" Musk said in his announcement he estimates "that within 2 to 3 years, the lowest cost way to generate AI compute will be in space."

Revenue reached $3.03 billion, up 31% sequentially and 61% year-over-year from $1.88 billion. Non-GAAP earnings hit $6.20 per share, significantly beating the consensus estimates. GAAP net income soared to $803 million, a 672% increase from $104 million a year ago; gross margins expanded to 51.1%, reflecting higher pricing and a favorable product mix; and free cash flow jumped over 1,000% year-over-year.

As the global race to build AI infrastructure accelerates, India has offered foreign cloud providers zero taxes through 2047 on services sold outside the country if they run those workloads from Indian data centers - a bid to attract the next wave of AI computing investment, even as power shortages and water stress threaten expansion in the South Asian nation.