Microsoft CEO Nadella Says Company Must Earn Community Permission for Data Centers

Alibaba Group outlined plans for a much larger AI model, a new accelerator and a vast expansion of cloud capacity, sending its U.S. shares down about 0.6% to $109.97 at 11.08am ET on Friday. The company plans to train a model with 5 trillion to 10 trillion parameters, versus 2.4 trillion for its current flagship, Qwen 3.8 Max. Alibaba says its Zhenwu V900 chip delivers three times the performance of its predecessor and can work in clusters of up to 500,000 chips. As Reuters reported, Alibaba is also targeting more than 20 gigawatts of global data center capacity by 2032. At $109.97, the stock trades 9.37% below the $121.34 GF Value cited by GuruFocus, leaving the payoff dependent on customers using the new capacity heavily enough to cover its cost.

Dell Technologies shares climbed 4% Friday after Morgan Stanley raised the probability attached to its $756 bull-case scenario following a meeting with Chief Operating Officer Jeff Clarke, while leaving its Neutral rating and $511 target unchanged. The shift centers on whether AI spending represents another hardware replacement cycle or a broader expansion in infrastructure demand. Clarke told the brokerage that AI agents could drive inference-token usage 87 times higher by 2030, potentially creating additional demand for computing capacity. Morgan Stanley's unchanged base-case valuation means the note did not alter its formal recommendation, but the higher probability assigned to the more optimistic scenario gave investors another data point as they assess whether Dell's AI infrastructure growth can persist beyond the current spending cycle.

Cipher Digital agreed to extend the lease on its Barber Lake data center in Colorado City, Texas, to 20 years from 10, lifting total contracted revenue at the site to more than $9 billion from $3.8 billion. The developer and operator of large-scale data centers amended its existing lease with Fluidstack, and an unnamed leading AI lab made a binding commitment to lease the facility for a further 10 years once that term ends, on substantially similar economics. That second term is expected to bring in about $5.2 billion of additional contracted revenue. Data halls will now be delivered in phases from the fourth quarter of 2026 through the first quarter of 2027, with rent starting as each hall comes online. Cipher will absorb the first $359.3 million of costs above the original budget, and the tenant will cover 50% of anything beyond that, repaid as additional rent over the 20-year term with a contracted return for Cipher. CEO Tyler Page said the extension reflects the enduring value of the infrastructure the company is building.