Visualising AI spending: How does it compare with history's mega projects? World leaders and tech executives are convening in New Delhi for the India-AI Impact Summit 2026, focusing on the role of artificial intelligence in governance, job disruption and global collaboration. However, behind these discussions lies the financial reality. Over the past decade, AI has drawn one of the largest waves of private investment in modern history, totalling trillions of dollars. According to Gartner, a United States-based business and technology insights company, worldwide spending on AI is forecast to total $2.5 trillion in 2026, a 44 percent increase over 2025.

Traders on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange as markets fell on Friday morning trading after a steep drop on Thursday, as investors continue to worry about the impact of AI on business and the wider economy. Traders on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange as markets fell on Friday morning trading after a steep drop on Thursday, as investors continue to worry about the impact of AI on business and the wider economy. The message from investors to the software, wealth management, legal services and logistics industries this month has been clear: AI is coming for your business. The release of new, ever more powerful AI tools has coincided with a stock market slide, which has swept up sectors as diverse as drug distribution, commercial property and price comparison sites. Advances in the technology are giving increasing credulity to predictions that it could render millions of white-collar jobs obsolete - or, at least, eat into the profits of established companies.

This story appears in the March 2026 print edition. While some stories from this issue are not yet available to read online, you can explore more from the magazine . Get our editors' guide to what matters in the world, delivered to your inbox every weekday. America Isn't Ready for What AI Will Do to Jobs Does anyone have a plan for what happens next? In 1869, a group of Massachusetts reformers persuaded the state to try a simple idea: counting. The Second Industrial Revolution was belching its way through New England, teaching mill and factory owners a lesson most M.B.A. students now learn in their first semester: that efficiency gains tend to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is usually somebody else. They were operating at speeds that the human body--an elegant piece of engineering designed over millions of years for entirely different purposes--simply wasn't built to match. The owners knew this, just as they knew that there's a limit to how much misery people are willing to tolerate before they start setting fire to things. Still, the machines pressed on. Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read. So Massachusetts created the nation's first Bureau of Statistics of Labor, hoping that data might accomplish what conscience could not. By measuring work hours, conditions, wages, and what economists now call "negative externalities" but were then called "children's arms torn off," policy makers figured they might be able to produce reasonably fair outcomes for everyone. A few years later, with federal troops shooting at striking railroad workers and wealthy citizens funding private armories--leading indicators that things in your society aren't going great--Congress decided that this idea might be worth trying at scale and created the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Measurement doesn't abolish injustice; it rarely even settles arguments. But the act of counting--of trying to see clearly, of committing the government to a shared set of facts--signals an intention to be fair, or at least to be caught trying. It's one way a republic earns the right to be believed in. The BLS remains a small miracle of civilization.

Asked about the terms of the deal, including the board seats, the timing and the size of the investment, Mr. Wachsman said, "We made the deal in question because we strongly believe that it was what was best for our company as we continue to grow." Representatives for Sheikh Tahnoon did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The Trump family's business dealings with the Emiratis have blurred the line between government and private enterprise, alarming ethics experts and congressional Democrats. Sheikh Tahnoon, a member of the Emirati royal family, has been a major foreign policy intermediary with the United States for over a decade on matters varying from combating terrorism to sharing advanced computer technology. He runs a sprawling investment empire that includes G42, a technology firm that has become a powerhouse in the booming world of artificial intelligence.

Americans pulling into a Starbucks drive thru might think they are being served by a friendly staff member. But at some locations, the voice listening to the order is actually an AI robot. Behind the counter inside the store, baristas can lean on a virtual personal assistant to recall recipes or manage schedules. In the back of the shop, a scanning tool has taken on the painstaking process of counting the inventory, relieving staff of one of retail's most tedious chores, in a bid to fix the out-of-stock gaps that have frustrated the firm. The new technology is part of the hundreds of millions of dollars the 55-year-old coffee giant has been investing as it tries to win back customers after several years of struggling sales.

Microsoft stock has slumped 12 percent as part of a software industry sell-off, stoking fears of whether hefty investments in artificial intelligence will pay off across the sector. The Redmond, Washington-based tech giant is on track Thursday to finish at its worst day since March 2020 and has seen approximately $400bn in valuation wiped out. Capital expenditures grew by 66 percent in the second quarter compared with the same period the year before, reaching a record $37.5bn for the quarter. Meanwhile, Microsoft predicted Azure growth to stay stable in the period from January to March at 37 percent to 38 percent, after slowing in the last three months of 2025, partially due to AI chip capacity constraints. "[Wall Street] wanted to see less cap-ex spending and faster cloud/AI monetisation and coming out of the gates, it's the opposite. We have said this is a multi-year journey, and Redmond needs to focus on its data center buildout with more customers heading down the AI path. It's a balancing act with 2026 the inflection year for AI and MSFT [Microsoft]," Dan Ives, analyst at Wedbush Securities, said in a note provided to Al Jazeera.

Tesla says its annual revenue has fallen for the first time as the electric vehicle (EV) maker shifts it focus to artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics. The company, which is run by multi-billionaire Elon Musk, reported a 3% decline in total revenues in 2025, while profits fell 61% in the last three months of the year. Tesla also announced plans to end production of its Model S and Model X vehicles. It will now use the manufacturing plant in California that made those cars to produce its line of humanoid robots - known as Optimus. In January, China's BYD overtook Tesla as the world's biggest EV maker, while Musk's involvement in politics both in the US and abroad has proved controversial.

Amazon is slashing 16,000 jobs in a second wave of layoffs at the e-commerce giant in three months, as the company restructures and leans on artificial intelligence. Wednesday's cuts follow the 14,000 redundancies that the Seattle, Washington-based company made in October. The layoffs are expected to affect employees working in Prime Video, Amazon Web Services, and the company's human resources department, according to the Reuters news agency, which first reported the cuts. In a memo to the employees, shared with Al Jazeera, Amazon said workers in the United States impacted by the cuts will have a 90-day window to find a new role in the company. "Teammates who are unable to find a new role at Amazon or who choose not to look for one, we'll provide transition support including severance pay, outplacement services, health insurance benefits [as applicable], and more," Beth Galetti, senior vice president of People Experience and Technology at Amazon, said in the note provided to Al Jazeera.

A whistleblower trapped inside a "pig butchering" scam compound gave WIRED a vast trove of its internal materials--including 4,200 pages of messages that lay out its operations in unprecedented detail. Just before 8am one day last April, an office manager who went by the name Amani sent out a motivational message to his colleagues and subordinates. "Every day brings a new opportunity--a chance to connect, to inspire, and to make a difference," he wrote in his 500-word post to an office-wide WhatsApp group. "Talk to that next customer like you're bringing them something valuable--because you are." He and his underlings worked inside a " pig butchering " compound, a criminal operation built to carry out scams --promising romance and riches from crypto investments--that often defraud victims out of hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars at a time. The workers Amani was addressing were eight hours into their 15-hour night shift in a high-rise building in the Golden Triangle special economic zone in Northern Laos. Like their marks, most of them were victims, too: forced laborers trapped in the compound, held in debt bondage with no passports. They struggled to meet scam revenue quotas to avoid fines that deepened their debt.

Altman's campaigning for his company coincides with its use of enormous present resources to serve an imagined future OpenAI CEO Sam Altman poses during the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Action Summit, at the Grand Palais, in Paris, on February 11, 2025. Sam Altman has claimed over the years that the advancement of AI could solve climate change, cure cancer, create a benevolent superintelligence beyond human comprehension, provide a tutor for every student, take over nearly half of the tasks in the economy and create what he calls "universal extreme wealth". In order to bring about his utopian future, Altman is demanding enormous resources from the present. As CEO of OpenAI, the world's most valuable privately owned company, he has in recent months announced plans for $1tn of investment into datacenters and struck multibillion-dollar deals with several chipmakers. If completed, the datacenters are expected to use more power than entire European nations .