DATA CENTERS

Tech giants spread data center plans

Amid multibillion-dollar AI infrastructure buildouts, tech firms may be seeking to spread eastward. 

Several tech companies announced plans to build data centers internationally, investing billions to create AI hubs outside  the US as they battle to expand their influence in the market. 

On Tuesday alone, four data center projects were announced by tech firms and investors:

• Microsoft announced plans to invest $10 billion in an AI data center in Sines, a town along Portugal’s coast, in partnership with British startup Nscale. 

• Google unveiled plans to invest $6.4 billion into data centers and operations in Germany over the next four years, including two data centers in Frankfurt.

• Investor group Stock Farm Road is partnering with Stanford-backed AI firm Voltai to build a $35 billion AI data center in the South Jeolla Province of South Korea, entirely designed, built and run by AI, called Project Concord. 

• AI chip firm Cerebras is assisting the government of Guyana in building the region’s first data center, located in the town of Wales, as part of the firm’s program called Cerebras for Nations, aiming to help other countries adopt AI. Though the financial figures weren’t released, the data center will have a capacity of 100 megawatts. 

And these projects aren’t the first time we’ve seen tech firms take an interest in setting up shop overseas. OpenAI announced plans for a one-gigawatt data center in the United Arab Emirates in May, with 200 megawatts expected to go online in 2026, and revealed plans for a 500 megawatt data center in Argentina in October. Google announced a $15 billion investment in an AI data center in India in October. 

The biggest benefit of establishing a presence outside of the US might be space itself, John Boyd, Jr., Principal of The Boyd Company, told The Deep View. The intense power requirements of these facilities threaten to stress the US power grid and increase “NIMBY pressures” in US data center hubs like Northern Virginia and Washington State. 

Plus, setting up AI data centers in these countries could significantly cut latency and help overcome regulatory and “data sovereignty” issues in regions that these firms see as prime for “strategic regional growth,” Trevor Morgan, chief operating officer of OpenDrives, told The Deep View. 

“Depending upon where your core processing is occurring versus where your users are, it means that localization is super important,” said Morgan.

The benefits to these tech firms may also extend beyond the facilities themselves. These firms are clearly interested in garnering adoption overseas, such as by setting up offices away from home or offering free trials to certain markets. This is a sign that “the US market is saturated,” Morgan noted, both in terms of infrastructure and AI services. Establishing influence in international markets – especially those that don’t have a strong local AI market as it stands – could help them reach more people who want to buy what they’re selling.

TOGETHER WITH WORKABLE

Hire Smarter & Faster With AI That Scales as You Grow

Whether you’re hiring your first few employees or scaling to hundreds, Workable’s AI helps teams grow efficiently at any stage.

Recruiting is one of the few domains where AI delivers immediate, measurable value. Workable’s AI automates sourcing, screening, and communication—freeing recruiters to focus on what people do best: interviews, insights, and decisions.

Every year, Workable screens over 100 million applicants, helping teams of every size find the right people faster. Startups love it for its simplicity; enterprises rely on it for consistency and scale.

Wherever your company is headed, Workable helps you get there—with hiring that’s faster, smarter, and more human.

See how Workable’s AI helps recruiters hire faster.

CULTURE

OpenAI loses German music copyright case

The AI industry’s budding relationship with the music sector has hit a snag.

A Munich court ruled that OpenAI violated German copyright laws after ChatGPT reproduced lyrics from popular German songs. The case, filed by German music rights group GEMA, claimed OpenAI trained ChatGPT on nine unlicensed tracks, including Herbert Grönemeyer’s “Männer” and “Bochum.”

As part of the ruling, OpenAI must pay an undisclosed fine. The company disputes the verdict, arguing ChatGPT’s lyrical reproductions stem from training on vast datasets—not individual songs—and that users are ultimately responsible for what’s generated through prompting. 

Still, the decision underscores how European courts interpret AI’s production of lyrical outputs as copyright violations, cementing the EU’s strict stance on data privacy and IP protections.

The ruling diverges from the music industry’s recent embrace of AI amid ongoing debates over training data. Just last week, University Music Group, a major record label, forged a partnership with Stability AI to build AI-tools for music creation that will support the “creative and commercial success” of artists shortly after UMG’s settled a copyright lawsuit with AI music platform Udio. 

That same week, performance rights organizations BMI, ASCAP and SOCAN revealed they’re accepting registrations for music that blends AI-generated music with human authorship. 

Music listeners seem increasingly open to songs touched by AI. In September, Xania Monet became the first AI-generated artist to land a multimillion-dollar record deal, with R&B hits like “Let Go, Let God” charting on Billboard airplay. A recent study even found that over half of listeners couldn’t distinguish AI-generated songs from human-made ones.

The question now isn’t whether AI will shape music, but whether it can withstand pushback from the very industry it hopes to transform.

TOGETHER WITH MONDAY.COM

What do high-performing teams have in common?

Top teams don’t chase updates or juggle disconnected tools. They manage everything on one platform — with monday.com.

See why 61% of the Fortune 500 run on monday.com.

From startups to global enterprises, teams use monday.com to move faster, stay aligned, and make work visible at every level.

With AI woven into every workflow, monday.com keeps teams moving — assigning owners, flagging blockers, and accelerating delivery.

“monday.com has been an accelerant for us — helping us transform and become the best creative agency we can be, worldwide.” — Paul Wille, COO North America, VML

Explore monday.com — and see what it can unlock for your team.

RESEARCH

AI translators are getting better

AI is becoming more worldly. 

On Monday, Meta released an open source “omnilingual” speech recognition model, capable of supporting more than 1,600 languages, including 500 “low-resource languages never before transcribed by AI.” The polyglot model extends far beyond OpenAI’s Whisper model, which supports 99 languages. 

In addition to the large swathe of languages this model already knows, Meta’s Omnilingual system can extend to new languages without requiring expert fine-tuning, relying instead on a handful of in-context examples, the company noted. 

The goal is to make “spoken language universally accessible,” Meta said in its announcement. Speech recognition models, however, often focus on a "limited set of high-resource languages that are well represented on the internet.” 

“This means high-quality transcriptions are often unavailable for speakers of less widely represented or low-resource languages, furthering the digital divide,” the company noted. 

And Meta isn’t the only one seeking to use AI to bridge conversational gaps. In December, a government agency in the Philippines released a project called ITanong, a chatbot capable of English, Filipino and Taglish. And in October, a UK nonprofit developed an AI chatbot called Ulangizi AI specifically designed for farmers in Malawi to get advice in their own language.

But the capabilities of these models could put translators’ jobs at severe risk: A survey released by Microsoft in July that measured the exposure of occupations to generative AI named interpreters and translators as the job with the highest amount of “AI applicability.”

However, while these models have a strong grasp on language itself, communication goes beyond words. For example, AI models may struggle to convey emotion, translate words that don’t have exact equivalents across languages, understand sarcasm or recognize local slang that isn’t universal. Replacing human interpreters with AI runs the risk of meaning being lost in translation.

LINKS

• Yann LeCun will leave Meta to start his own venture 

• SoftBank sells entire stake in Nvidia, worth nearly $6 billion

• Meta, Nebius sign $3 billion neocloud deal 

• Intel AI head Sachin Katti leaves the company to join OpenAI

• Voice agent startup Beside emerges from stealth with $32 million

• AI agent startup Wonderful raises $100 million Series A for customer service agents

• AI coding startup Lovable nears 8 million users 

• AMD predicts 35% annual sales growth on AI demand

• Google Nano Banana: new, more personalized AI-powered image editing capabilities for Google Photos. 

• ElevenLabs Scribe v2 Realtime: A new speech-to-text model with no lag, capable of handling multiple speakers with context.  

• Sanctum: Ship features to simulated users to test bugs and UX friction before your product gets in front of real users. 

• Questom: An AI agent builder for merch companies, for tasks such as collecting details, sending quotes and guiding customers.

• Google Private AI Compute: a “fortified” space offering the same security one would get via on-device processing.

• Snowflake: AI Research Scientist - Reinforcement Learning

• Microsoft: Principal Applied Scientist

• Google DeepMind: Senior Research Engineer, Responsibility

• Tencent: Senior AI Strategy Researcher

GAMES

A QUICK POLL BEFORE YOU GO

Should the EU relax its tech regulations to boost AI competitiveness?

• Yes — innovation first (20%)

• No — keep strong protections (25%)

• Yes, but selectively (22%)

• Need more details (17%)

• Other (share more) (16%)