#ai-investment

#ai-investment

Masayoshi Son isn't known for half measures. The SoftBank founder's career has been studded with brow-raising bets, each one seemingly more outrageous than the last. His latest move is to cash out his entire $5.8 billion NVIDIA stake to go all-in on AI, and while it surprised the business world on Tuesday, it maybe should not. At this point, it's almost more surprising when the 68-year-old Son doesn't push his chips to the center of the table.

The amount of money being spent on artificial intelligence is astronomical. Investors have lavished the top tech companies and startups alike with hundreds of billions of dollars - so much so, in fact, that an estimated 92 percent of US GDP growth now comes from AI. If trends continue in 2026, conservative estimates peg the spending from just the "largest technology firms" at $550 billion.

The company's chief executive, Johan Svanstrom, said AI was "becoming absolutely central" to the running of the business and its plans for the future. But investors were less enthusiastic, and Rightmove's shares had sunk by more than a quarter at one point on Friday. Rightmove announced plans to invest 60m over the next three years and a large part of this investment will focus on AI.

The platform simplifies social media engagement by automating conversations through Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp. What started as a messenger automation startup has evolved into a global community of over one million users across 170 countries, backed by a team of more than 350 employees. In April 2025, Manychat announced it had raised $140 million in growth capital led by Summit Partners to accelerate AI innovation, global expansion, and product development. This milestone underscores the company's accelerating momentum and growing influence in the creator economy.

The broad index of large-cap companies in the S&P 500 closed flat, but the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 rose 0.55%. Tech stocks were led by Nvidia, which was up 3%, and now has a market cap of more than $5 trillion. (Its stock is down 0.7% premarket this morning, suggesting that some traders are taking their overnight gains.) To put that in perspective, Nvidia's market cap is bigger than the GDP of every G7 country except the U.S. and Japan.

Big Tech's AI gold rush isn't slowing down- it's getting more expensive. Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft all opened their wallets wider than ever this quarter, logging record-breaking capital expenditures on AI chips, servers, and data centers. Microsoft was the top spender at nearly $35 billion, narrowly beating Amazon. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company could increase itslong-term asset spending, or capital expenditure (capex), by as much as 24% next year. Each company said it planned to spend even more on capex going forward.

Is the UK truly becoming an AI hub as US tech giants pour in billions? A multibillion-dollar deal is being hailed as proof that Britain is becoming a global hub for artificial intelligence, with major United States tech companies investing heavily. But the reality is a little less straightforward. On today's show, we ask: how much power, and how much of your personal data, are you willing to hand over to tech companies?

"Having taken into account the feedback received following our proposed decision, we have today designated Google's search services with strategic market status," according to the authority.

Rishi Sunak has been appointed as a senior adviser by the US technology companies Microsoft and Anthropic. The former British prime minister's pair of new jobs emerged on Thursday in letters published by Westminster's office of the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (Acoba). They add to his roles as a senior adviser to Goldman Sachs International, the investment bank, and speechmaker to investment firms including Bain Capital and Makena Capital in the US, which have netted him over 150,000 a talk.

The only regret I have about xAI - we're an investor already - is that I didn't give him more money.

Dimon said in an interview with Bloomberg TV on Tuesday that the bank spends about $2 billion a year on AI and is seeing about the same amount in direct benefits. "We have shown that for $2 billion of expense, we have about $2 billion of benefit," Dimon said. "We did this, we reduced headcount, we saved this time and money."

The deals are so vast that they defy comprehension - the Financial Times put the company's recent commitments at north of $1 trillion - and they're making public companies' stock prices jump. Stock analysts dub some of these agreements "circular," because investment money is flowing between companies that also buy from or sell to one another. The worry then is that such deals might prop up or overhype a bad business.

As the Washington Post observed in newreporting on the AI bubble, speculative investment into AI development is now the dominant force driving the US economy. By the numbers, the US GDP has grown at a rate of 1.6 percent so far this year, on pace to hit the 2.8 percent growth it achieved in 2024. That's all well and good on paper, except for the troubling fact that two-thirds of that growth came from AI, per WaPo 's analysis.