Data Centers

The artificial intelligence buildout met its clearest political test yet on Tuesday, and voters were not persuaded. In 41 local ballot measures across 10 states on November 3, voters backed restrictions on data centers or rejected proposals that would have helped them get built in 40 cases, according to an analysis by Ballotpedia and results compiled by CNBC. The results, still unofficial, covered bans, moratoriums, zoning changes and requirements for public votes on large projects.

Marvell Technology announced on Monday that it will buy optical components maker Lumentum in an all-stock deal with an enterprise value of 115 billion dollars, including debt. It is one of the biggest technology deals of 2026, and among the boldest bets yet that the artificial intelligence spending boom will last for years — not on faster chips alone, but on the light-based connections that move data between them.

OpenAI is preparing a coordinated policy and public relations push to begin immediately after Tuesday's midterm elections, Axios reported on Sunday, in an effort to shape the next Congress and frame the debate heading into the 2028 presidential race.

Saudi Arabia has put its national artificial intelligence company under two of the most powerful owners in the kingdom. The Public Investment Fund (PIF) and Aramco announced on November 1 that they have closed a transaction in which Aramco, through a wholly owned subsidiary, acquires a 49 percent stake in HUMAIN, while PIF retains the remaining 51 percent.

A consortium led by Mubbadrah Investment has unveiled plans to build a 3 billion dollar artificial intelligence data centre in Oman, with planned capacity of up to 400 megawatts. The project was announced at a signing ceremony in London during the state visit to the United Kingdom of Sultan Haitham bin Tarik, and it is intended for hyperscale operators running large-scale AI training and inference workloads, with room to expand beyond the initial build.

Google is putting far more weight behind an unusual answer to the AI power crunch: paying households and businesses to use less electricity at the moments the grid needs relief most. On Thursday, Google and distributed energy platform Voltus announced a tenfold expansion of their "Bring Your Own Capacity" agreement in the PJM region, adding 1,070 megawatts of flexible capacity to the 100 megawatts the two companies first committed in June.

The bill for the artificial intelligence buildout got more expensive on Wednesday, and investors noticed. Shares of debt-heavy AI infrastructure companies tumbled as the prospect of higher U.S. interest rates revived a basic question about the boom: how much return will all of this borrowed money actually produce?

Microsoft has made its biggest move yet to run its artificial intelligence services on hardware of its own design. On Monday the company unveiled Maia 300, the third generation of its custom AI chip, and said it plans to deploy potentially more than a million of them starting next year in multi-gigawatt installations. Chief Executive Satya Nadella described the rollout as the company's biggest bet yet on its own silicon, and Azure executive Scott Guthrie said Maia is intended to become the primary system for running AI inference across Microsoft's products and services.

Broadcom chief executive Hock Tan thinks the AI boom's new limiting factor is not silicon. Speaking at a panel in Singapore on Monday, Tan said capital — not wafer or memory shortages — will be the biggest constraint on AI development as the industry pushes forward. The company, he said, is working through its wafer and memory shortages. The harder problem, increasingly, is paying for what comes next.

Who pays for the electricity that AI eats? Three senators just published their answer: you do — and Big Tech likes it that way.

On October 9, Senators Elizabeth Warren, Chris Van Hollen, and Richard Blumenthal released a 27-page report, Power and Profits: How the AI Data Center Boom Costs Households and Communities, the product of a nearly yearlong investigation into AI data centers' impact on communities. The inquiry began with information requests sent December 15, 2025, to seven companies: Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, CoreWeave, Digital Realty, and Equinix.