Microsoft Vows to Spend $80 Billion on AI Data Centers This Year
Redmond said Friday it would spend $80 billion to built out AI-enabled data centers in the fiscal year that ends in June.
Microsoft plans to spend tens of billions of dollars to build out AI data center infrastructure in its current fiscal year. “AI promises to drive innovation and boost productivity in every sector of the economy,” Microsoft President Brad Smith wrote in a blog post Friday. “None of this progress would be possible without new partnerships founded on large-scale infrastructure investments that serve as the essential foundation of AI innovation and use.”
The executive said Microsoft plans to invest $80 billion in fiscal 2025 to build out AI-enabled data centers that train models and run AI applications globally, with more than half of the spending in the U.S. The company’s fiscal 2025 represents the 12 months ending in June 2025.
In the company’s September quarter, Microsoft spent $20 billion on capital expenditures, including finance leases—up 79% from the prior year. At the time, Microsoft said it expected capex to rise sequentially in the December quarter given rising demand for cloud and AI services. Capex includes spending to build data center infrastructure, among other investments.
Microsoft’s $80 billion spending figure is another sign that momentum is building around another strong wave of AI data center spending this year.
More on Microsoft’s AI Data Center spending on Yahoo Finance
Jeff Clune | Agentic AI Needs Darwin
AI professor Jeff Clune ruminates on open-ended evolutionary algorithms—systems designed to generate novel and interesting outcomes forever. Drawing inspiration from nature’s boundless creativity, Clune and his collaborators aim to build “Darwin Complete” search spaces, where any computable environment can be simulated.
By harnessing the power of large language models and reinforcement learning, these AI agents continuously develop new skills, explore uncharted domains, and even cooperate with one another in complex tasks.
Alibaba Tieup With Lee Kai-fu’s Unicorn As China’s AI Sector Consolidates
Alibaba Group Holding’s cloud computing business is collaborating with Chinese start-up 01.AI to develop artificial intelligence (AI) models, a sign of consolidation in an increasingly crowded market on the mainland.
Alibaba Cloud announced on Thursday it had reached a deal with Beijing-based 01.AI, founded by former Google China head Lee Kai-fu, to set up an “industrial large model laboratory”.
The lab will combine the research and development capabilities of the two teams to explore technology and services related to AI models, with the aim to create “strong and comprehensive large model solutions” for business clients, according to a statement from Alibaba Cloud. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.
Founded in May 2023, 01.AI achieved unicorn status just six months later, after a funding round that included Alibaba Cloud. The start-up’s open-source foundational large language model (LLM) Yi-34B was once ranked as the best pre-trained model by online AI community Hugging Face. It has since fallen behind.
More on Alibaba and 01.AI tie-up on South China Morning Post
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang At CES 2025
Click the Notify Me button to join NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang live on YouTube from CES on January 6 at 6:30 p.m. PT for an exclusive look at groundbreaking innovations in AI, gaming, robotics, and beyond. This is not yet a live video, join to watch Jan 6th.
I’ve partnered with Moving On IT, your authorized partner for IT, AI, and Cybersecurity hardware and software solutions. Moving On IT is a value added reseller of brands like Cisco, HP Enterprise, Juniper / Mist AI, Nvidia, and more.
Call Moving On IT for a complimentary quote: 727-490-9418, or info@movingonit.com
Reebok's 89-Year-Old Founder Is Launching the World's First Futuristic AI Shoe | 'Challenges Are Opportunities'
Joe Foster co-founded Reebok in 1958. Now, he's partnering with a 25-year-old entrepreneur to debut what they say is the first commercial shoe made with AI.
In 1958, Joe Foster co-founded Reebok and helped grow the company to be worth $4 billion, he says, before exiting in 1991. (Adidas bought Reebok for $3.8 billion in 2005 before selling it in 2021.)
Now the 89-year-old entrepreneur is helping launch a new high-tech shoe brand with slides that are fully 3D printed, meaning they are printed out, not assembled, from layer after layer of stacked plastic filament.
It's also the first commercially available shoe designed by AI, the founder tells Entrepreneur. The shoe is the first from Syntilay, a brand being advised by Foster. Syntilay's founder and CEO is serial entrepreneur Ben Weiss, 25, who has previously released a weekly podcast, an NFT company, and a sneaker brand.
More on Syntilay, the world’s first AI commercial shoe, on Entrepreneur
Kara Swisher Talks Future of AI With Panel At Hopkins Bloomberg Center
Johns Hopkins University and Vox Media have teamed up to present the On with Kara Swisher podcast sessions live at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center.
Swisher moderated a panel featuring Hopkins AI experts Gillian K. Hadfield and Mark Dredze with special guest Rumman Chowdhury to discuss AI regulation.
More about the panel: Gillian K. Hadfield, Johns Hopkins University Professor, School of Government and Policy and Research Professor, Computer Science, Whiting School of Engineering Mark Dredze, Johns Hopkins University Interim Deputy Director of the Data Science and AI Institute, John C. Malone Professor of Computer Science, Whiting School of Engineering Rumman Chowdhury, CEO and co-founder, Humane Intelligence and United States Science Envoy, Artificial Intelligence.
Apheris Rethinks AI Data Bottleneck In Life Science With Federated Computing
AI is fundamentally dependent on data, but the vast majority of health data goes unused for understandable reasons — chiefly patient privacy, regulation, and IP.
“This is the core underlying problem” of building AI solutions for life sciences and related areas like pharmaceutics, said German entrepreneur Robin Röhm. And not only that: Collaboration when it comes to sensitive data can be a challenge. Apheris, Röhm’s startup, aims to address this through federated computing: making data securely accessible for AI model training without moving it by taking a decentralized approach. Its customers include Roche and several hospitals, he said.
The core philosophy of federated computing is that “computations are executed locally where data resides, and only the outputs (e.g., model parameters) are aggregated centrally,” says Marcin Hejka, a co-founder and managing partner at OTB Ventures. Hejka has now co-led an $8.25 million Series A into Apheris alongside fellow deep tech investor eCAPITAL.
Hejka believes Apheris could become a critical component in the federated data networks that are starting to emerge. “We see a maturing ecosystem of third-party software tools (open source federation engines, data quality tools, and security products),” he told TechCrunch. “Apheris also enables seamless integration with complementary privacy-enhancing technologies (homomorphic encryption, differential privacy, synthetic data).”
More on Apheris’ solutions and fundraising on TechCrunch
Google Veo 2 Animals Demo | Jerrod Lew
In this video Jerrod Lew uses his early access to Google’s Veo 2 to try his hand at generating animals. To me these examples are almost imperceptible as being AI.
Thats all for today, however new advancements, investments, and partnerships are happening as you read this. AI is moving fast, subscribe today to stay informed.