1.Mukesh Ambani is Building World’s Biggest Data Centre

Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Group is said to be building what may become the world’s biggest data centre by capacity in India, the latest in a blitz of global investments to capitalise on booming demand for artificial intelligence services. The 67-year-old billionaire is said to be buying Nvidia’s powerful AI semiconductors and setting up a data centre in the town of Jamnagar that’s expected to have a total capacity of 3 gigawatts.

That would make it far bigger than any data centre now operating. That would be timely — global demand for data centre capacity could more than triple by 2030 to reach an annual level of 219 gigawatts, according to McKinsey. 

2.L&T Semiconductor plans $10 bn investment in silicon fabrication plant

L&T Semiconductor Technologies (LTSCT), a fully owned subsidiary of Larsen & Toubro, has put together a plan to invest over $10 billion in a silicon fabrication (fab) plant after it gains clear visibility by 2026-27 of hitting at least a $1 billion per annum revenue run rate by selling its own designed and patented chips and semiconductor products (manufactured by third parties) in both the Indian and global markets.

Speaking to Business Standard, Sandeep Kumar, chief executive officer of the company, said: “We have decided not to follow the foundry path like Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) and make chips for others; instead, we want to go down the product path. A fab plant will require an investment of over $10 billion. Even with subsidies, it will mean an investment of $1 billion.”

3.India Built a Perfect System to Ignore Its Deadly Air. (It's working.)

On paper, the government is serious about improving the quality of air across the country. And it is spending the money as well. In fact, there is a National Clean Air Programme (NCAP) to monitor how things are going, Samarth Bansal and Anushka Banerjee tell us in a well investigated report that appears on The Plank. Thanks to Founding Fuel for pointing this article out.

“A quick glance at Clean Air Action plans across cities will make you lose count of proposed solutions—it seems everything that can possibly be done is being planned and acted upon. 

But follow the money, and you see the real priorities. As of September 2024, as per government data, ~₹5,100 crores of the total ~₹7,600 crores of NCAP funding utilised so far went in controlling road dust. (The Center for Science and Environment had highlighted this in July 2024.)

Just look at what this means. For every hundred rupees spent from central government coffers in its fight against pollution, 67 is going to mitigate dust. Cities are literally being paid to focus on the more visible, but less lethal threat.

To understand why this matters—why a seemingly technical shift in measurements has profound consequences for public health—you need to understand what we’re actually measuring, and what we’re choosing to ignore.

Air pollution isn’t one thing. It’s gases—like ozone and nitrogen dioxide—and particles of different sizes. The tiniest particles are our deadliest enemy.

These particles—called particulate matter or PM—are measured in two sizes. PM10 particles are up to 10 micrometres wide. Some, like dust, you can see. Others you can’t. 

But your body has defences against them. They get caught in your nose, trapped in mucus, sneezed out. They’re harmful—they irritate your airways and cause breathing problems—but your body can fight them.

Then there’s PM2.5. These particles are so small that thirty could fit across the width of a human hair. And this is what makes them devastating. Too small to be caught by nose hairs or trapped by mucus, they slip past every defence your body has evolved. They reach the deepest parts of your lungs—tiny air sacs called alveoli where oxygen enters your blood.

From here, these particles enter your bloodstream, reaching your heart, brain, liver, and kidneys. Once inside, they keep your body in a constant state of stress and inflammation, damaging cells day after day, year after year. These are the same kinds of stresses that doctors warn about when they push you to exercise and eat healthy.

But here’s the cruel twist: Even if you follow every health rule—even if you exercise daily and eat the cleanest diet—you can’t escape these particles. In fact, when you’re out for your morning run, taking deep breaths, and pushing yourself to be healthier, you’re actually pulling more of these particles deeper into your lungs.”

4.President Donald Trump’s virtual visit to Davos laid out his vision for Trump 2.0.

Here are some highlights of his address:

AI Infrastructure investment: Trump touted the $500 bn Stargate project with Oracle, SoftBank, and OpenAI, citing it as evidence of renewed business confidence in the U.S. He also will press Saudi Arabia to invest up to $1 trillion, saying he’ll ask Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to “round it up” from $600 billion.

Tariffs & Trade: Trump laid out a simple formula: manufacture in America with low taxes, or face tariffs. He called them “stroke of the pen” policies that will generate “trillions” for the Treasury.

Russia’s war in Ukraine: The president blamed high oil prices for prolonging the conflict. “If the price came down,” he said, “the Russia-Ukraine war would end immediately.” He described war as the worst since World War II.

NATO: Trump wants to more than double NATO members’ defense spending requirements to 5% of GDP. He claimed credit for getting members to pay 2% during his first term: “They didn’t pay until I came along.”

E.U. relations: He called the European Union “very, very unfair” to the U.S., citing VAT taxes, agricultural barriers, and slow approvals for building projects. Trump shared an anecdote about a week-long Irish approval that would’ve taken “5-6 years” from the E.U. He made sure to add a diplomatic caveat: “I love Europe, I love the countries of Europe, but the process is a very cumbersome one.”

However, today Trump softened his stand on China tariffs saying he would rather not impose tariffs on China. His remarks contrast with recent comments in which he threatened 10% penalties, and fall short of proposed 60% levies floated during his campaign.

5.When A.I. Passes This Test, Look Out: New York Times

If you’re looking for a new reason to be nervous about artificial intelligence, try this: Some of the smartest humans in the world are struggling to create tests that A.I. systems can’t pass." Kevin Roose in the NYT (gift article) : When A.I. Passes This Test, Look Out. "The creators of a new test called 'Humanity’s Last Exam' argue we may soon lose the ability to create tests hard enough for A.I. models."

6.OpenAI launches Operator—an agent that can use a computer for you: MIT Technology Review

What’s new: After weeks of buzz, OpenAI has released Operator, its first AI agent. Operator is a web app that can carry out simple online tasks in a browser, such as booking concert tickets or filling an online grocery order. The app is powered by a new model called Computer-Using Agent—CUA for short—built on top of OpenAI’s multimodal large language model GPT-4o.

Why it matters: OpenAI claims that Operator outperforms similar rival tools, including Anthropic’s Computer Use and Google DeepMind’s Mariner. The fact that three of the world’s top AI firms have converged on the same vision of what agent-based models could be makes one thing clear. The battle for AI supremacy has a new frontier—and it’s our computer screens. Read the full story.

7.Why sleep quality is so important – and so difficult to measure

Sleeping a solid 8 hours isn't the whole story and the quality of your sleep might matter more. But what does sleep quality mean and how can we measure it?

“Everyone has their own definition of sleep quality – and that is the problem,” says sleep researcher Nicole Tang at the University of Warwick, UK.

Though sleep quality and what defines it is a puzzle scientists are still figuring out, we do know that a good night’s rest involves a series of sleep cycles, the distinct succession of phases of brain activity we experience during sleep. And for most of us, each stage of those cycles is necessary to wake up feeling refreshed. The average person experiences four to five complete cycles during a night and disrupting these can come with health consequences, both in the short and long term.

“Poor sleep quality is associated with many adverse physical health outcomes,” says Jean-Philippe Chaput at the University of Ottawa, Canada. Similar to what you can expect from not sleeping enough (see “Why your chronotype is key to figuring out how much sleep you need”), these include a higher risk of cardiovascular disease, stroke, hypertension, type 2 diabetes and weight gain.

8.Chinese AI is catching up, posing a dilemma for Donald Trump

If there is a single technology America needs to bring about the “thrilling new era of national success” that President Donald Trump promised in his inauguration speech, it is generative artificial intelligence. At the very least, ai will add to the next decade’s productivity gains, fuelling economic growth. At the most, it will power humanity through a transformation comparable to the Industrial Revolution.

Mr Trump’s hosting the next day of the launch of “the largest ai infrastructure project in history” shows he grasps the potential. But so does the rest of the world—and most of all, China. Even as Mr Trump was giving his inaugural oration, a Chinese firm released the latest impressive large language model (LLM). Suddenly, America’s lead over China in ai looks smaller than at any time since ChatGPT became famous.

China’s catch-up is startling because it had been so far behind—and because America had set out to slow it down. Joe Biden’s administration feared that advanced ai could secure the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) military supremacy. So America has curtailed exports to China of the best chips for training ai and cut off China’s access to many of the machines needed to make substitutes. Behind its protective wall, Silicon Valley has swaggered. Chinese researchers devour American papers on ai; Americans have rarely returned the compliment.

Yet China’s most recent progress is upending the industry and embarrassing American policymakers. The success of the Chinese models, combined with industry-wide changes, could turn the economics of AI on its head. America must prepare for a world in which Chinese AI is breathing down its neck.

China’s LLMs are not the very best. But they are far cheaper to make. QwQ, owned by Alibaba, an e-commerce giant, was launched in November and is less than three months behind America’s top models. DeepSeek, whose creator was spun out of an investment firm, ranks seventh by one benchmark. It was apparently trained using 2,000 second-rate chips—versus 16,000 first-class chips for Meta’s model, which DeepSeek beats on some rankings. The cost of training an American LLM is tens of millions of dollars and rising. DeepSeek’s owner says it spent under $6m.

American firms can copy DeepSeek’s techniques if they want to, because its model is open-source. But cheap training will change the industry at the same time as model design is evolving. China’s inauguration-day release was DeepSeek’s “reasoning” model, designed to compete with a state-of-the-art offering by OpenAI. These models talk to themselves before answering a query. This “thinking” produces a better answer, but it also uses more electricity. As the quality of output goes up, the costs mount.

The result is that, just as China has brought down the fixed cost of building models, so the marginal cost of querying them is going up. If those two trends continue, the economics of the tech industry would invert. In web search and social networking, replicating a giant incumbent like Google involved enormous fixed costs of investment and the capacity to bear huge losses. But the cost per search was infinitesimal. This—and the network effects inherent to many web technologies—made such markets winner-takes-all.

If good-enough AI models can be trained relatively cheaply, then models will proliferate, especially as many countries are desperate to have their own. And a high cost-per-query may likewise encourage more built-for-purpose models that yield efficient, specialised answers with minimal querying.

The other consequence of China’s breakthrough is that America faces asymmetric competition. It is now clear that China will innovate around obstacles such as a lack of the best chips, whether by efficiency gains or by compensating for an absence of high-quality hardware with more quantity. China’s homegrown chips are getting better, including those designed by Huawei, a technology firm that a generation ago achieved widespread adoption of its telecoms equipment with a cheap-and-cheerful approach.

If China stays close to the frontier, it could be the first to make the leap to superintelligence. Should that happen, it might gain more than just a military advantage. In a superintelligence scenario, winner-takes-all dynamics may suddenly reassert themselves. Even if the industry stays on today’s track, the widespread adoption of Chinese AI around the world could give the ccp enormous political influence, at least as worrying as the propaganda threat posed by TikTok, a Chinese-owned video-sharing app whose future in America remains unclear.

What should Mr Trump do? His infrastructure announcement was a good start. America must clear legal obstacles to building data centres. It should also ensure that hiring foreign engineers is easy, and reform defence procurement to encourage the rapid adoption of ai.

Some argue that he should also repeal the chip-industry export bans. The Biden administration conceded that the ban failed to contain Chinese AI. Yet that does not mean it accomplished nothing. In the worst case, AI could be as deadly as nuclear weapons. America would never ship its adversaries the components for nukes, even if they had other ways of getting them. Chinese AI would surely be stronger still if it now regained easy access to the very best chips.

More important is to pare back Mr Biden’s draft “AI diffusion rule”, which would govern which countries have access to American technology. This is designed to force other countries into America’s ai ecosystem, but the tech industry has argued that, by laying down red tape, it will do the opposite. With every Chinese advance, this objection becomes more credible. If America assumes that its technology is the only option for the likes of India or Indonesia, it risks overplaying its hand. Some tech whizzes promise the next innovation will once again put America far in front. Perhaps. But it would be dangerous to take America’s lead for granted. ■