AI Infrastructure & Data Centers

NEW YORK – October 19, 2026 -- The four largest hyperscalers plan more than $700 billion of capital spending this year, and Egan-Jones Ratings expects mainstream support from both US parties to keep the AI buildout going despite public opposition to local data centers.

Gallup poll shows 71% of Americans oppose a local AI data center

Egan-Jones cites Gallup data showing 71% of Americans oppose a local AI data center, against 53% for a nuclear plant. Its commentary draws a parallel with drug makers, which have stayed unpopular for years yet kept bipartisan backing while leading all other industries in federal lobbying almost every quarter since 2010.

AI has also gained ground at the ballot box. The pro-AI super PAC network Leading the Future has raised $140 million for the midterms.

United States – October 19, 2026 -- Six of the largest hyperscalers are on track to spend more than $700 billion on computing infrastructure this year, about double the record set in 2025, as gains from shrinking transistors fade and performance is bought by building bigger systems.

Brute-force scaling replaces transistor shrinkage as the main source of progress

The spending goes into new data center sites faster than the electrical grid can feed them. Progress now comes mostly from adding chips, memory, power and cooling rather than from smaller transistors. In AI, training compute has doubled roughly every six months since 2010, far faster than Moore's Law allows, and little of that growth comes from shrinking.

Global – October 19, 2026 -- Tech stocks shed over $1 trillion on Friday as investors grew nervous that AI companies may not turn sustainable profits, NBC reported.

Microsoft also pulled out of a giant AI cloud deal in the UK, according to Gizmodo. The report adds to concerns about the economics of large-scale AI infrastructure.

China weighs curbs on overseas access to its AI models

China is considering restricting overseas access to its AI models, Bloomberg reported. Beijing is also looking at curbing the sharing of chip designs, among other measures. Any such limits would affect foreign developers and buyers that rely on Chinese models.

Global – October 19, 2026 -- Lightelligence has presented dOCS, an optical circuit switching (OCS) interconnect module that it says is built on the world's first silicon photonic OCS chip, aimed at AI clusters, GPU superclusters and high-performance computing (HPC) systems.

dOCS integrates optical switching into a QSFP-DD module

The module embeds switching directly in the interconnect. Signals can be routed through external optical ports or through internal cross-connections.

Lightelligence built the chip with its proprietary integrated photonic integrated circuit (PIC) technology. The built-in switching function links xPUs in a QSFP-DD form factor, which the company describes as deployment-friendly.

Shenzhen – October 19, 2026 -- More than half of cloud data center capital expenditure is expected to go to memory and storage, excluding HBM, by 2027, according to a projection by Morgan Stanley's Daniel Yen presented at the 5th GMIF Innovation Summit. The forum, themed "The Future Built on AI Memory and Storage," was co-hosted by the Shenzhen Memory Industry Association (SMIA) and Peking University's School of Integrated Circuits at the Renaissance Shenzhen Bay Hotel.

Yen said global data center capex will stay strong in the coming years. He named six paths to overcome the "memory wall": process migration, design changes, advanced packaging, memory peripherals, PIM/CIM and new materials.

San Jose – October 18, 2026 -- Linktel Technologies says its 1.6T Linear Pluggable Optics (LPO) 2DR4 module runs at power consumption as low as 10W. The company presented the module to data center architects at the 2026 OCP Global Summit as a way to ease power and cooling loads in AI networks.

Linktel's DSP-free 1.6T LPO design targets latency and component bottlenecks

The linear optics architecture cuts signal processing delays, which Linktel describes as critical for high-performance AI scale-out fabrics. Eliminating the optical DSP also removes component choke points, according to the company, supporting scalability for mass deployments.

Linktel reported multi-switch platform interoperability at the early September 2026 1.6T LPO-MSA Plugfest. It describes that result as a foundation for the 200G-per-wavelength ecosystem.

Dubai – October 17, 2026 -- Robo.ai Inc. (Nasdaq: AIIO) will cut its Class B share count from 222,116,290 to 8,884,684 through a 1-for-25 reverse stock split effective October 17, 2026, subject to shareholder approval at an extraordinary general meeting (EGM) on October 26.

Class A count falls to 552,701 shares from 13,817,501

The split applies to all classes of ordinary shares. Adjusted trading of the publicly traded Class B shares begins at market open, U.S. Eastern time, on November 6 under the existing ticker "AIIO", with a new CUSIP number of G6693P130. The split takes effect at 9:30 am Eastern.

Robo.ai expects the Class B share price to rise proportionately but gives no assurance that it will reach 25 times the pre-split price. Par value per share rises from US$0.002 to US$0.05 for both classes.

Las Vegas – October 17, 2026 -- Hyperscale Data, Inc. (NYSE American: GPUS) is targeting a separate public listing of its AI subsidiary askROI, Inc. by the second or third quarter of 2027, via a reverse takeover (RTO), an initial public offering (IPO) or a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) merger.

The timing depends on which route the company ultimately selects. In an RTO, askROI would be sold to a public company that has not yet been identified, in the first half of 2027. Hyperscale Data would receive shares of that company as consideration and would then need to file a resale registration statement for them. The plan is subject to financial and regulatory requirements and to prevailing market conditions.

London – October 17, 2026 -- The global green data center market will grow from USD 26.71 billion in 2025 to USD 90.38 billion by 2035, a CAGR of 12.96%, according to a new DC Market Insights report. AI-driven rack density is raising the value of efficient power and cooling per MW, while water constraints, grid pressure and energy costs push operators toward liquid cooling, heat reuse, renewable power and facility retrofits.

AI halls carried USD 3.09 million of green content per MW in 2025

Green power and cooling content in AI halls reached approximately USD 3.09 million per MW in 2025. The report says this materially raises green infrastructure value per unit of IT capacity. The market stood at USD 7.25 billion in 2020.

Global – October 16, 2026 -- Lightelligence says its oMAC photonic computing processor cuts on-chip latency to below one nanosecond by processing data with light instead of electricity.

oMAC targets Moore's Law limits with photonic linear compute units

The company positions oMAC as a route past the single-chip performance limits of Moore's Law. The processor uses photonic linear compute units to accelerate linear operations, which it says delivers advantages in low latency and high throughput.

The processor sits within Lightelligence's proprietary optoelectronic hybrid computing architecture. The company says the architecture exploits the low latency, low power consumption and high throughput of light. It says it continues to raise the computing power limit of a single card through large-scale optoelectronic integration.