AI search engine Perplexity has inked a three-year, $750 million cloud agreement with Microsoft. The deal gives it access to frontier models from OpenAI and others, even as the company maintains its primary partnership is still with Amazon Web Services.
Bharti Airtel is breaking ground on a 5MW data center in Tripura, a state in northeast India. The $22 million facility represents a strategic move into an underserved region, far from the country’s traditional data center hubs.
Palo Alto Networks has finalized its massive $3.35 billion acquisition of observability provider Chronosphere. The move aims to supercharge its AI and cloud security capabilities by integrating Chronosphere’s tech with its Cortex AgentiX platform.
NEC has signed a virtual power purchase agreement for the environmental value of a 48.3MW wind farm in Japan. The deal, active since December 25, now covers about 50% of the electricity for its data center portfolio. It’s a major step in the company’s renewable energy strategy.
Microsoft’s quarterly results revealed a massive 66% jump in capital spending, driven largely by AI infrastructure. While Azure revenue grew 39%, the slim beat and heavy reliance on OpenAI left investors unimpressed, sending shares down 4%.
Facebook’s parent company is nearly doubling its capital investments to fuel its AI ambitions. The staggering amount highlights the immense, and growing, cost of competing in the generative AI race.
Microsoft and Meta are pouring tens of billions into AI infrastructure, fueling stellar revenue growth. But analysts see a plateau coming, and a host of suspects—from impatient investors to new rivals—could bring the spending frenzy to a sudden, messy end.
IBM just posted its strongest growth in years, with Q4 2025 revenue surging 12.8% to $19.67 billion. The numbers validate CEO Arvind Krishna’s long-term strategy to pivot IBM into a software-led hybrid cloud and AI powerhouse, with software now making up 45% of the business.
A joint venture called UPC Volt has signed an MoU to build a 100MW data center in Telangana, India. The project represents a proposed investment of $544 million and would take over five years to construct.
A deep freeze over the weekend caused a massive, unexpected spike in electricity demand in the heart of U.S. data center country. Wholesale power prices in Virginia skyrocketed, highlighting the grid strain from AI and cloud computing.
