#ai-infrastructure

#ai-infrastructure

Starting December 17, the computer maker is set to hike prices across its commercial product lines, according to an internal list of upcoming price changes sent to staff on December 9 and seen by Business Insider. The list outlines price hikes for Dell'scommercial business - meaning its sales to corporate clients rather than individual consumers. The commercial business accounts for about 85% of Dell's annual revenue in the Client Solutions Group (CSG), the division that sells laptops and PCs, according to its latest annual results.

Amid this change, agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) becomes a critical asset. Whereas classic RAG grounded models in trusted data; agentic RAG adds multi-step reasoning, tool use and secure system coordination on top. In short, agentic RAG provides the scaffolding businesses usually can't construct themselves. Especially in the mid-market and for SMBs, obstacles like aging infrastructure, overextended teams and limited resources often stand in the way of custom-built AI.

The feat was achieved by re-architecting key components of Kubernetes' control plane and storage backend, replacing the traditional etcd data store with a custom Spanner-based system that can support massive scale, and optimizing cluster APIs and scheduling logic to reduce load from constant node and pod updates. The engineering team also introduced new tooling for automated, parallelized node pool provisioning and faster resizing, helping overcome typical bottlenecks that would hinder responsiveness at such a scale.

Global IT spending has grown at the fastest rate in nearly 30 years, according to IDC, largely thanks to the boom in AI and cloud services and PC refresh cycles. Figures from IDC's latest show that spending on hardware, software, and IT services is on course to rise by 14%. That's the fastest year of growth since 1996, when the launch of Windows 95, expanding PC usage, and internet adoption were the primary drivers of IT spending. Now it's all about the massive AI infrastructure investment wave driving another 'supercycle' of tech spending, IDC noted, with the figure set to reach $4.25 trillion.

Cofounders Chris Lattner and Tim Davis have spent decades building the software plumbing that sits beneath the modern tech industry. Lattner is famous for creating Apple's Swift programming language. He also built the software underpinning Google's TPU AI chips, with Modular cofounder Tim Davis. They're now aiming that expertise at CUDA itself. The attempt borders on madness, but it's the kind of audacious project that could transform the AI industry.

US tech giant Microsoft announced on Tuesday that it will invest $17.5 billion (15 billion) in India over the next four years as it looks to strengthen the country's cloud and artificial intelligence infrastructure. CEO Satya Nadella shared the news of Microsoft's largest-ever investment in Asia in a post on X after meeting Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in New Delhi. Nadella said the multi-billion-dollar commitment is aimed at helping India develop the "infrastructure, skills, and sovereign capabilities" essential for an AI-driven future. Nadella is currently on a three-day visit to India, meeting policymakers and participating in AI-related events in Bengaluru the nation's technology center and Mumbai, its financial capital.

On December 3, The Wall Street Journal reported memory manufacturer Micron would wind down Crucial, its consumer business, to focus on components for the AI industry. The PC I'm writing this article on has an SSD and RAM from Crucial. Overnight, Micron decided to end a business it spent decades building, and from a certain perspective, I guess it makes sense. In recent months, OpenAI has signed more than $1.4 trillion worth of infrastructure deals, creating unprecedented demand for server-grade solid-state storage and RAM.

Datacenter capital expenditure is forecast to grow 17 percent annually through 2030, reaching $1.6 trillion, with supply chain constraints pushing up the price of components. The latest Cloud and Datacenter Market Snapshot [PDF] from analyst Omdia states that investment into AI infrastructure continues apace, despite all the talk of it being a bubble ready to burst. However, adoption of AI remains relatively low, it claims, with many more users and higher usage per user expected.

Even after adjusting for inflation, big tech companies are issuing more bonds than during the late 1990s. And the companies aren't just refinancing existing debt-they're taking on additional debt. "While the increasingly aggressive (and creative) borrowing by AI companies won't be their downfall, if they do fall short of investors' expectations and their stock prices suffer, their debts could quickly become a problem," Zandi wrote.

If you want to build a data center here in the United States from breaking ground to standing up a AI supercomputer is probably about three years,

November 2025 demonstrated exceptional strength in US venture capital with $18.2B invested across 409 companies, showing a 49.2% increase from October 2025's $12.2B and a robust 56.9% year-over-year increase from November 2024's $11.6B. The month featured eight mega-rounds exceeding $500M, led by Anysphere's record-breaking $2.3B late-stage round for its AI coding assistant Cursor. Artificial Intelligence maintained its dominance with an estimated $11.8B across AI-related companies (65% of total funding).

UiPath performed significantly better in the third quarter of fiscal year 2026 (ending October 31) than a year earlier. Revenue rose to $411 million, while the company turned from a small loss to a clear profit. This profit growth is mainly due to a higher gross margin and tight cost control. Importantly, recurring cloud revenue continues to grow. Agent-based automation and broader use of AI features are attracting new customers. Partnerships with Microsoft, Deloitte, and other cloud players are also helping to drive growth.

As Australia rides the AI boom with dozens of new investments in datacentres in Sydney and Melbourne, experts are warning about the impact these massive projects will have on already strained water resources. Water demand to service datacentres in Sydney alone is forecast to be larger than the volume of Canberra's total drinking water within the next decade. In Melbourne the Victorian government has announced a $5.5m investment to become Australia's datacentre capital,

Some of the world's most powerful and well-connected leaders converged in Manhattan on Wednesday, and one subject dominated the room: artificial intelligence. Three years after ChatGPT launched, revolutionizing the way the world thinks about and uses AI, the arms race is bigger than ever - perhaps too big. At the annual New York Times DealBook Summit, leaders from BlackRock's Larry Fink to Lai Ching-te, the President of Taiwan, were asked about the state of the AI industry and the potential for an AI bubble, a hot topic in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street over the past few months.

DRAM contract prices have increased 171 percent year over year, according to industry data. Gerry Chen, general manager of memory manufacturer TeamGroup, warned that the situation will worsen in the first half of 2026 once distributors exhaust their remaining inventory. He expects supply constraints to persist through late 2027 or beyond.

One of the biggest recent challenges we hear from many of you is around virtualization costs - licenses, fees are skyrocketing. You're faced with rigid architecture and upcoming deadlines and single vendor runtime models are becoming harder to adapt and afford. It is not enough to lift and shift to the public cloud. You need a cloud model and experience everywhere.

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.

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 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.