Arvind's Newsletter

1.Microsoft To Invest $3 Billion In India Over Two Years

Microsoft plans to spend $3 billion over the next two years to expand its cloud and artificial-intelligence infrastructure in India, the latest in a string of investment pledges by U.S. tech giants amid booming AI computing needs.

Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella said at an event in Bengaluru, India, on Tuesday that the investment marks the company’s single largest expansion in the country to date.

The company plans to grow the company’s Azure cloud business in India and set up new data centers. It is also aiming to train 10 million locals with AI skills by 2030.

2.Tata Electronics’ proposal to acquire majority stake in Pegatron India gets CCI nod

India's antitrust regulator, the Competition Commission of India (CCI), on Tuesday, January 7, approved Tata Electronics' proposal to acquire a majority stake in Pegatron Technology India. 

Pegatron India is a subsidiary of Taiwan-based Pegatron Corporation. The company, Pegatron India is engaged in the provision of electronics manufacturing services for smartphones like Apple and exports its products to countries in North America, Asia and Europe markets, reported the agency. 

3.Temasek nears deal to buy 10% stake in Haldiram at $10 billion valuation

After prolonged negotiations, Singapore government-owned investment firm Temasek is nearing a deal to acquire a 10 per cent stake in the consumer products firm Haldiram Snacks Foods from the promoters, with the company valued at $10 billion.

Both the Agrawal family and Temasek have signed a term sheet for a stake sale by the Agrawal family, Moneycontrol reported on Tuesday.

Temasek was one of several private equity (PE) firms, including Bain Capital and Blackstone, that had made offers to the Agrawal family, the promoters of Haldiram Snacks Foods, to purchase a stake in the unlisted company. The competing offer from American private equity giant Blackstone was for a 20 per cent stake but at a lower valuation.

4.AI means the end of internet search as we’ve known it; MIT Technology Review

We all know what it means, colloquially, to google something. You pop a few words in a search box and in return get a list of blue links to the most relevant results. Fundamentally, it’s just fetching information that’s already out there on the internet and showing it to you, in a structured way.

But all that is up for grabs. We are at a new inflection point.

The biggest change to the way search engines deliver information to us since the 1990s is happening right now. No more keyword searching. Instead, you can ask questions in natural language. And instead of links, you’ll increasingly be met with answers written by generative AI and based on live information from across the internet, delivered the same way. 

Not everyone is excited for the change. Publishers are completely freaked out. And people are also worried about what these new LLM-powered results will mean for our fundamental shared reality. Read the full story.

5.Meta is shifting towards the right

Meta Platforms chief executive Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday announced a decision to do away with the company's long-standing fact checking teams—choosing instead to establish a ‘community notes’ mechanism akin to Elon Musk’s X, formerly Twitter.

Meta has also appointed Dana White, the CEO of the Ultimate Fighting Championship and an ally of US President-elect Donald Trump, to its board. It is part of a wave of changes across Big Tech apparently intended to mend fences with Trump ahead of his accession. 

Meta’s policy chief was replaced by a Republican, while CEO Mark Zuckerberg donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund and had dinner at Mar-a-Lago. The CEOs of Amazon, Apple, and OpenAI have also made contributions to the inauguration.

6.Doctors are turning to AI for note-taking during appointments

Investment in artificial intelligence medical note-taking apps doubled in 2024, as Big Tech giants including Microsoft and Amazon and start-ups race to grab a share of the $26 bn AI healthcare market.

AI start-ups focused on creating digital “scribes” for health professionals raised $800 mn in 2024, compared to $390 mn in 2023, according to data from PitchBook. Start-ups such as Nabla, Heidi, Corti and Tortus raised money last year, with backers including Khosla Ventures, Entrepreneur First and French tech billionaire Xavier Niel.

The rise in funding comes as groups rush to launch AI-powered products that aim to make it quicker for doctors to take medical notes and improve patient interactions, as health becomes a key growth area in the AI boom.

Microsoft, which owns AI speech recognition company Nuance, as well as Amazon and Oracle have launched so-called AI co-pilots for physicians that use large language models and speech recognition to auto-generate transcripts of patient visits, highlight medically relevant details and create clinical summaries.

7.Singapore and Malaysia established a special economic zone spanning 3,500 square kilometers (1,350 square miles), or more than four times the size of the city-state.

Malaysia Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim and Singapore Prime Minister Lawrence Wong officiated a ceremony for the economic zone in Malaysia’s southern state of Johor, which shares one of the world’s busiest border crossings with Singapore.

The two countries pledged to promote and facilitate 100 projects within the first 10 years. Officials in Johor previously said they expect the zone to create as many as 100,000 new jobs and add $26 billion per year to Malaysia’s economy by 2030.

8.The agricultural machinery manufacturer John Deere is investing heavily in autonomous tractors. 

The agricultural sector is facing labor shortages in much of the rich world, and artificial intelligence-powered vehicles are becoming increasingly competent — self-driving taxis are becoming commonplace in several US and Chinese cities.

John Deere believes it can capitalise on both trends: It first introduced a driverless vehicle in 2022, but will soon begin selling autonomous dump trucks for quarries as well as lawn mowers, alongside more tractors.

The first generation of robo-tractors were built for the easiest and most automatable work, but at CES the company announced plans for fully autonomous farming systems capable of planting and harvesting corn and soybeans by 2030.

9.Manmohan Singh: India's Finest Talent Scout; Shruti Rajagopalan in her blog post; Some excerpts:

Singh was excellent at identifying young talent, most famously Montek Singh Ahluwalia. Before Montek and Isher Judge would go on to marry, they met Manmohan Singh in Delhi in 1970. At the time, Singh was a professor at the Delhi School of Economics, known for his work on India’s exports. He seemed too soft-spoken and erudite for the couple to imagine him joining the Ministry of Foreign Trade as an economic advisor just a year later. Over the years, Singh offered suggestions to Isher Judge for her macro-econometric model of the Indian economy, which formed the basis of her doctoral thesis at MIT under Stanley Fischer.

During his tenure as chief economic advisor (CEA) to the Government of India, Singh’s relationship with Ahluwalia deepened. Their conversations in Washington D.C., where Ahluwalia worked at the World Bank, became more frequent. When the position of economic advisor at the Finance Ministry opened, Singh saw an opportunity. He guided Ahluwalia into the bureaucracy, marking their transition from mentor and mentee to colleagues.

A worthy protégé, Ahluwalia drafted the famous blueprint for the first stage of reforms in 1991—dubbed the M-Document. Like Singh, he went on to become finance secretary and, later, deputy chairman of the Planning Commission. 

Ahluwalia was just one among dozens of economists that Singh mentored. But this cycle of mentorship, that Singh set in motion, would repeat well beyond his years in office. Ahluwalia recruited the next generation of talent, most notably Raghuram Rajan.

“Singh understood that lasting change comes not from solitary genius, but from creating ecosystems of excellence that outlast any individual.”

10.Where will you travel this year? The New York Times has published 52 Places to Go, an annual feature that highlights destinations across the U.S. and around the globe.

Some made the list because of anniversaries, like southwest England, which is celebrating the 250th birthday of Jane Austen. Others are newly accessible, like the Nangma Valley of Pakistan, which now features an easy camping-based trekking route through its Yosemite-like granite peaks. The only Indian entry is Assam, which I visited in December with a trip to the Kaziranga National Park and cruise on the Brahmaputra river and which I strongly recommend.

You can explore the full list here.