Seagate's 2026 Data Infrastructure Readiness Report found 99% of IT leaders expect AI-driven storage demand to grow within three years, with 32% expecting growth over 50%. Only 38% of organizations say they are ready; 86% already see moderate or significant AI returns.
Amsted Industries is exploring a sale of cooling systems maker Baltimore Aircoil Co. at a valuation of about $6 billion. The move is attributed to high demand for data center components.
A DCD Intelligence survey found that more than two-thirds of data center operators and developers face staff shortages. Nearly a third operate at less than 80% of required staffing, with the sharpest deficits in infrastructure, power and cooling.
G42-owned Core42 signed an agreement with the Abu Dhabi government-funded Technology Innovation Institute (TII) to develop local digital sovereignty and cybersecurity technologies. The partners will combine Core42's sovereign cloud and Compass AI platform with TII's security research.
Google signed its largest carbon removal contract with Terradot, a company using enhanced rock weathering technology. By 2030, it will purchase 1 million tons of methane effect, and by 2040, another 1 million tons of CO2 removal; credits will come from a project in Rio Grande do Sul in southern Brazil covering over 200,000 hectares of rice fields.
Gazprom launched a pilot project with Crypto Energy to deploy a modular data center powered by low-pressure associated gas at the depleted Medvezhye field in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug. Crypto Energy will build the data center and a gas piston power plant, with regional government support.
A $44 million subsea cable has been laid between Taiwan and the Matsu Islands to provide backup internet connectivity. The project ensures digital communication for the region when other lines are cut.
Nvidia has announced the dates and location of the next GTC conference: November 30 – December 3, 2026 in Washington. CEO Jensen Huang will deliver the keynote, with AI announcements expected. Registration is already open.
Former Labour deputy leader Lord Tom Watson announced he is joining Palantir as senior vice president. The appointment coincides with scrutiny of Palantir's £330M NHS contract, which has a break clause triggering in February 2027.
Bellevue-based startup Temporal, which builds infrastructure for reliable task execution and AI agents, raised $550M led by Lightspeed at a $12.55B valuation — double its February figure. Annual revenue exceeded $250M, with 4,300+ customers including OpenAI, Nvidia, Netflix, Snap and JPMorgan Chase.
Authorities in the Indian state of Odisha allocated 870 acres between Cuttack and Bhubaneswar for the "Odisha Silicon Valley" project. Five semiconductor projects worth ₹11,000 crore have been approved, and Intel and 3D Glass Solutions signed a memorandum for $3.3 billion in investments.
All 17 Apple stores in Italy went on strike on the day of the global iPhone 18 Pro sales launch. Unions Filcams CGIL, Fisascat CISL, and Uiltucs, representing over 1,600 employees, demand permanent contracts, hiring, and flexible schedules. Apple said stores are operating normally.
Investment firm Evercore raised its Apple stock price target by $15 to $380, citing a survey showing higher-than-expected upgrade demand for the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max and Apple Watch Series 12. 32% of respondents plan to buy the iPhone 18 Pro Max versus 29% a year earlier.
A jury in the Eastern District of Texas found Bambu Lab liable for infringing four Stratasys 3D printing patents and awarded about $27.6 million in past damages. It is the first of two suits filed in August 2024; no date is set for the second trial.
Zayo expanded its strategic agreement with Corning, securing a significant portion of fiber optic cable through the end of the decade. Zayo plans to add 15,000 route miles by 2030, including more than 8,000 miles of long-haul fiber with Nvidia.
Oracle signed wind energy supply agreements in Texas totaling more than 1.7 GW for the ERCOT grid. The power will supply its Abilene data center campus; Oracle aims to cover 100% of AI data center consumption with carbon-free energy by 2035.
US health insurer Angle Health, founded by former Palantir employees, raised $600M at a $2.7B valuation. London-based Vitruvian Partners led the round: $200M Series C and $400M share buyback from early investors. The company serves over 5,000 employers in 47 states.
AI cloud company Sharon AI acquired the former Visy paper mill in Ettamogah near Albury (New South Wales) for about AU$50 million (US$35.6 million). The company plans to turn the abandoned site into an operational facility; it has 212 MW of capacity online and in development and 64,000 Nvidia GPUs by mid-2027.
OpenAI opened 21 robotics vacancies in San Francisco; the highest-paid is an ML engineer at $380,000–500,000 plus equity, tasked with building the training pipeline. Engineers building the robots themselves have no salary ranges listed.
Oracle launched ChatGPT Enterprise and Codex for 160,000 employees in April–May 2026, and within three months 80% of staff were using them. The company faced unexpectedly high costs and introduced model cost tracking: GPT-6 Astra is 2.5 times more expensive than GPT-5.6 Terra.
Brookfield CEO Bruce Flatt said the AI race is already slowing because builders cannot keep up with the infrastructure demands of AI companies. According to him, capacity shortages are holding back the pace of development.
The FTC announced additional payouts from a $1.5 billion settlement with Amazon over Prime subscription practices. With about $665 million left from the initial $845 million, the recipient pool is expanded: now users who used up to 20 Prime features in a year qualify, and those already paid can claim up to $149 more.
Chinese AI startup Naive AI, founded in February by a Tsinghua University professor, has raised $400 million across three rounds and is valued at over $1.4 billion. Investors include Tencent. The company plans to release its first LLM this month as an open-weight model.
Google launched the open Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) for agentic commerce, developed with Shopify, Target, Walmart, Etsy and Wayfair. The protocol sets a common language for AI agents from product search to payment, while the companion AP2 creates a verifiable audit of transactions.
Xi Jinping plans a state visit to Washington on September 24, and the delegation may include heads of BYD, CATL, Gotion, Xiaomi, Hisense, Wanxiang and Bank of China. The list is not finalized, invitations will be sent in coming days; the agenda includes rare earth exports and extending the trade truce.
At the Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, Salesforce customers said they use older and cheaper AI models instead of frontier ones. According to them, last year's models are effective enough for sales and support, and switching to new ones requires time and budget.
A Computerworld analysis examines the wave of calls to 'slow down' AI from leaders of Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI. The author argues the real motives are not safety but saving on R&D, eliminating competitors, and hiding lack of profit: per a McKinsey survey, 80% of employees report productivity gains from AI, but only 37% of companies see it in revenue.
EQT Infrastructure has backed a $2 billion investment in small batteries to reduce electricity costs for industrial consumers and accelerate data center connections to the largest US power grid.
Verizon has asked the FCC for permission to shut down traditional copper-line telephone service in certain US regions. The company is migrating customers to fiber and wireless services, preserving numbers and offering alternatives where available.
Mitsubishi Electric's ME Innovation Fund invested in Japanese startup OptQC, which develops an optical quantum computer. The amount is undisclosed. OptQC spun out of the Furusawa lab at the University of Tokyo and has delivered its first commercial system to a public research institute.
