Annual spending on artificial intelligence infrastructure may reach as much as $1.5 trillion by 2031, consulting firm Bain & Co. said in its annual global technology report. The global artificial intelligence industry needs to earn $6 trillion in annual revenue by 2031 to justify the capital being deployed to build data centers around the world, Bain & Co. said. Existing consumer and enterprise AI services may generate as much as $1.8 trillion of that sum, leaving $4.2 trillion in new revenue that needs to be created, the consulting firm said Tuesday in its annual global technology report. The shortfall likely will come from nascent segments ranging from autonomous machines to robotics, as well as emerging fields such as drug discovery, mental health and energy generation, it said. "What the industry needs is a wave of innovation that will dwarf what mobile and cloud unlocked," said David Crawford, the report's lead author and chair of Bain's Global Technology, Media, and Telecommunications practice.

Businesses finally seeing AI ROI, but 62% can't handle the storage demands A Seagate study finds that 99% of IT leaders expect AI to drive increased data storage needs, but only 38% are prepared to meet them, revealing a significant readiness gap. Kayla Solino is a ZDNET Editor based in New York City and New Jersey. A new study finds 62% of organizations are ill-prepared to tackle surging storage needs. Organizations must lean in to AI's growing data demands and infrastructure readiness. "Sustainable scaling" may be the key to optimizing AI growth, according to Seagate's study.

GoPro is the latest surprising name to move into the AI data center market amid a merger with an optical-photonics company called Starman Optical. The shareholders of GoPro, which will remain publicly listed, will receive 285 million when the deal closes and retain around 10 percent ownership. GoPro's outstanding debt of around 92 million will be paid too. The merger is subject to shareholder agreement, as well as regulatory approvals and closing conditions. GoPro expects the deal to close by the end of 2026.

Are Microsoft's AI plans being held back by a shortage of chips? Mon 17 Aug 2026 00.00 EDTLast modified on Mon 17 Aug 2026 00.15 EDT The chips are quite small and some can be held in the palm of a hand. They are fundamental to the development of artificial intelligence models - and the world's biggest technology companies need vast numbers of them to keep ahead. Microsoft is one of them. And, on paper, it seems to have a problem.

Plus: Nvidia has secured $500 billion from Wall Street for AI infrastructure. Nine years after Google researchers introduced the transformer, this family of neural networks has become the engine inside every major large language model. But transformers are starting to show their age. As LLMs get bigger and better, transformers have become a bottleneck. Their dense attention mechanism becomes increasingly expensive as the amount of text grows, and they're not great at keeping track of a lot of information at once. Here are four new ideas for how to solve the transformer problem --innovations that could change LLMs for good, making them faster, far more efficient, and (maybe) even smarter.

Who will control Africa's AI infrastructure, and at what cost? In April, African Union ministers gathered in Tangier, Morocco, to discuss artificial intelligence at a moment when governments across the continent are racing to develop AI strategies, attract investment and expand digital infrastructure. Beneath the enthusiasm, however, sits a more fundamental question. As foreign technology companies invest in data centres, cloud services and AI systems across Africa, how much control will African countries ultimately have over the infrastructure on which those technologies depend? The debate reflects a broader shift in how policymakers are thinking about AI.

World's largest chipmaker does not rule out price rises as costs increase The world's largest chipmaker has told the BBC that inflation is pushing up the cost of doing business, and did not rule out price rises. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) makes the most advanced chips designed by companies such as Nvidia, AMD and Apple, so any increase in pricing could ripple through to the cost of AI infrastructure, and potentially over time, the prices customers pay for their electronic devices. However, the firm's chief financial officer, Wendell Huang, said it would not introduce sudden fourfold, fivefold price rises. We reflect our value, he said, pointing to its technology leadership and manufacturing excellence. In an exclusive and wide-ranging interview, Huang also denied that the AI boom was a bubble and that the firm's global expansion was due to geopolitical pressure.

WhatsApp launches totally private'incognito' conversations with its AI chatbot WhatsApp has introduced private chats with its AI chatbot which not even the tech company will be able to read in a new incognito mode. It means neither the user nor the AI's responses will be monitored if the feature is activated, and past conversations will disappear from the chat for the user. Will Cathcart, the head of WhatsApp, said he felt people wanted to have private conversations with AI on sensitive subjects including health, relationships and finances and didn't want them to be accessible. But a cyber security expert has told the BBC this could lead to a lack of accountability for WhatsApp if things go wrong, as they would have no access to chat history. WhatsApp is owned by Meta, which also owns Instagram, Facebook and Messenger.

Can the US legally seize a Venezuelan tanker? What are the implications of Trump's Somali'garbage' comments? United States President Donald Trump has often said that since he took office in January, the US has received trillions of dollars in promises of investments, and the dollar amount he cites changes. On his second day in office, January 21, Trump said the US had "already secured nearly $3 trillion of new investments". By May 8, that figure had risen to " close to $10 trillion ".

OpenAI is planning to spend $1.4tn on AI infrastructure over the next eight years. OpenAI is planning to spend $1.4tn on AI infrastructure over the next eight years. Amazon is in talks to invest more than $10bn (£7.5bn) in OpenAI, in the latest funding deal being struck by the startup behind ChatGPT . If it goes ahead, the market valuation of OpenAI could rise above $500bn, according to The Information, a tech news site that revealed the negotiations . Amazon, which is best known as an online retailer, is also the world's largest datacentre provider and its investment would help OpenAI pay for its commitments to rent capacity from cloud computing companies - including Amazon .