After a strong quarter for new phone customers, Verizon raised its 2026 forecasts and signed a deal worth more than $2bn with Amazon Web Services for AI workloads. Verizon will supply high-capacity network links and help add distributed computing capacity across many sites.
Shares in neocloud providers fell after Elon Musk said more than 200 of them face 'guppy-level death'. Investors were already questioning their debt-fuelled expansion and whether the AI infrastructure build-out will pay off over time.
Meta has launched two share offerings worth about $35bn to help pay for its rising AI spending. The larger, $22.5bn of Class A stock, uses forward sale agreements under which Meta delivers the shares now and receives the money later, by November 19, 2027 at the latest.
Debt issued by AI infrastructure providers and neoclouds is losing investors' confidence. They doubt future revenue from the technology can pay back such enormous spending.
A video from Hong Kong outlet HKEPC shows Chinese factories taking apart hundreds of new GeForce RTX 5090 cards to turn them into boards for AI servers. Meanwhile, Nvidia's card is becoming increasingly scarce in shops.
A JDN column argues that AI changes scale, speed and access to skills, and that controlling access to computing power addresses all three. Cloud platforms are the power plants of this era, and the open question is who will control them.