The logo of the Adani Group is seen on the facade of its Corporate House on the outskirts of Ahmedabad, India, November 21, 2024. 

Amit Dave | Reuters

India’s Adani on Tuesday announced plans to invest $100 billion to develop renewable energy-powered AI-ready data centers by 2035, seeking to establish the world’s largest integrated data center platform.

The blockbuster investment, which comes as India pushes to gain a stronger foothold in the global AI race, is expected to create a $250 billion AI infrastructure ecosystem in India over the next decade, Adani said.

The initiative is also poised to incentivize an additional $150 billion in spending across server manufacturing, sovereign cloud platforms, and supporting industries, the company said.

“The world is entering an Intelligence Revolution more profound than any previous Industrial Revolution,” Gautam Adani, chairman of Adani Group, said in a statement.

“India will not be a mere consumer in the AI age. We will be the creators, the builders and the exporters of intelligence and we are proud to be able to participate in that future,” he added.

The announcement coincides with India’s AI Impact Summit, a five-day event which got underway on Monday. Global leaders and technology executives are expected to take part in the summit, which has been billed as the first major international AI meeting hosted in the Global South.

Shares of Adani Enterprises, the flagship company of Adani Group, rose 2.3% on the news, making it one of the top gainers on the benchmark Nifty 50 stock index. Shares of Adani Green Energy were last seen up 1.8%.

Adani’s AI push is designed to build on AdaniConnex’s existing 2 gigawatt (GW) national data center, with plans to expand toward a 5 GW target. It is this deployment that the company says will create the world’s largest integrated data center platform.

AdaniConnex is a joint venture between Adani Group and EdgeConnex, a global data center provider.

Adani said its vision is supported by its partnerships with Google. The multinational conglomerate added that it was also in talks with other major players to establish large-scale campuses across India, without providing further details.

Google’s parent company Alphabet said in October that it would invest $15 billion over the next five years to build an AI data center hub in southern India.

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Elon Musk, chief executive officer of Tesla Inc., during the US-Saudi Investment Forum at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, US, on Wednesday, Nov. 19, 2025.

Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Elon Musk said a primary reason for merging SpaceX with his artificial intelligence startup, xAI, is to more effectively build “orbital data centers.” That’s for a far-off future.

For now, xAI has a much more pressing need: cash.

In Monday’s blog post announcing the combination of his two companies, Musk estimated that “within 2 to 3 years, the lowest cost way to generate AI compute will be in space.” But xAI requires immense amounts of money to finance its massive infrastructure buildout as the three-year-old company tries to catch up to Google, OpenAI and Anthropic in the booming generative AI market.

SpaceX, which is reportedly aiming to go public this year in what could be a record-setting IPO, may represent Musk’s clearest path to landing that capital. The company is looking to raise up to $50 billion at a valuation as high as $1.5 trillion, according to Reuters.

A major key to SpaceX’s growth is Starlink, its satellite internet service, which has around 9,000 satellites in orbit today and roughly 9 million customers. It recently received authorization from the Federal Communications Commission to put another 7,500 satellites into orbit.

Tim Farrar, president of satellite and telecom industry research firm TMF Associates, said SpaceX can’t put that kind of money to work towards its existing business because there are only so many rocket launches available to get its Starlink satellites up into space each year.

Folding xAI into SpaceX, Farrar said, allows Musk to capitalize on investors’ insatiable appetite for AI holdings, while also securing the AI company’s financial position despite its mounting losses. According to a report from The Information late Monday, xAI has told investors that it burned about $9.5 billion through the first nine months of 2025.

“People are throwing tens of billions of dollars at AI companies right now, and in six months or 12 months time, they might have changed their mind about it,” Farrar said. “Getting the money is feasible” now but may not be forever.

In early January, xAI closed a $20 billion funding round at about a $230 billion valuation. OpenAI was valued at $500 billion in October, and is reportedly looking to bump that up to about $750 billion in its next round. Anthropic signed a term sheet this month for a funding that values the company at $350 billion.

In addition to a friendly capital market, Musk has the benefit of an extremely favorable regulatory landscape, as the Trump administration rolls back environmental, antitrust and other regulations.

Nowhere in Monday’s blog post was there mention of any need for regulatory approval, and Musk suggested in the first sentence of the statement that the transaction is done. Public records with the state of Nevada obtained by CNBC indicate that the deal was completed on Feb. 2, with Space Exploration Technologies Corp. listed as the “managing member” of X.AI Holdings.

Of particular importance to Musk is the recent installation of his business associate and former SpaceX investor and customer Jared Isaacman as the head of NASA. Isaacman has supported speeding up initiatives that would expand the agency’s contracts with SpaceX. And at the FCC, Chairman Brendan Carr has been a vocal proponent of SpaceX’s Starlink.

Commander Jared Isaacman of Polaris Dawn, a private human spaceflight mission, speaks at a press conference at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, U.S. August 19, 2024. 

Joe Skipper | Reuters

The landscape for tech mergers has also changed dramatically, with President Donald Trump in the White House and Republicans controlling both houses of Congress. The Federal Trade Commission is now run by Trump appointee Andrew Ferguson rather than Lina Khan, who was known for blocking big tech deals during Joe Biden’s presidency.

When it comes to AI, Musk’s longtime friend David Sacks is the White House crypto and AI czar, and has pushed the federal government to limit the amount of oversight AI labs face as they pursue aggressive growth strategies. In December, President Trump signed an executive order issuing a single regulation framework for AI, undermining the power of individual states — namely blue states like California and New York — to implement their own rules.

“To win, United States AI companies must be free to innovate without cumbersome regulation,” the order said. “But excessive State regulation thwarts this imperative.”

While Musk still has three years left of a second Trump administration, he may have only a small window of unified Republican control, with the mid-term elections taking place in nine months and the president’s favorability numbers sinking.

Related party transactions

Musk is moving fast. And he likely has the backing of a loyal band of investors who have a long history of supporting his intermingling of resources and merging of companies.

In 2016, Tesla acquired SolarCity for $2.6 billion, rescuing it from a looming liquidity crunch. Before the merger, Musk was a key investor in the solar business and served as chairman of the company, which he started with his cousins.

During his leveraged buyout of Twitter (which later became X) in 2022, Musk sold billions of dollars worth of his Tesla shares to finance the deal. He also tapped dozens of employees, even some executives, from SpaceX, Tesla and tunneling venture The Boring Co., to help him with the takeover and to make sweeping changes to the platform.

At Tesla, Musk has engaged in a number of related party transactions with SpaceX and, more recently, xAI. For example, Tesla has sold car parts and solar equipment to SpaceX, and the automaker relied on SpaceX to develop a special alloy for its Cybertruck.

In 2025, Tesla sold $430 million worth of its giant backup batteries called Megapacks to xAI, according to a filing out last week, accounting for about 3.4% of Tesla’s energy business revenue for the year. The batteries help power xAI’s data infrastructure that it’s building out around Memphis, Tennessee.

Shortly before that filing landed, Tesla said it was investing $2 billion into xAI as part of the company’s latest financing round. In July 2025, SpaceX reportedly invested $2 billion into xAI as well.

Farrar said that Musk’s biggest fans and institutional investors are willing to support the tangled web of transactions, or the “Muskonomy,” in part because they understand the symbolic importance of keeping his entire portfolio strong.

“The whole thing relies on confidence in him,” Farrar said. “If any piece of his empire was to fall by the wayside or go bankrupt, then it would undermine everything.”

WATCH: SpaceX could be the first $500 billion IPO, says Lerer Hippeau’s Eric Hippeau

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Electricity prices are surging, voters are growing angry, and the artificial intelligence industry’s data centers are increasingly a target for blame with U.S. mid-term elections on the horizon.

Residential utility bills rose 6% on average nationwide in August compared with the same period in the previous year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

The reasons for price increases are often complex and vary by region. But in at least three states with high concentrations of data centers, electric bills climbed much faster than the national average during that period. Prices, for example, surged by 13% in Virginia, 16% in Illinois and 12% in Ohio.

The tech companies and AI labs are building data centers that consume a gigawatt or more of electricity in some cases, equivalent to more than 800,000 homes, the size of a city essentially.

Virginia has the highest concentration of data centers in the world. Democrat Abigail Spanberger won the state’s recent governor’s race in a landslide by campaigning on cost of living. Spanberger put at least part of the blame for rising electricity prices on data centers, promising to make tech companies “pay their own way and their fair share” of the escalating costs.

The governor’s race could be a harbinger of political headwinds for the AI industry’s data center buildout with the mid-term elections just a year away and Democrats zeroing in on affordability as their central issue. In Washington, some Democratic senators are targeting the close relationship that President Donald Trump has developed with the leaders of the major tech companies and AI labs.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont took aim this week at what they described as the White House’s “sweetheart deals with Big Tech companies,” accusing the administration of failing to protect consumers from “being forced to subsidize the cost of data centers.”

“The techlash is real,” said Abraham Silverman, who served as general counsel for New Jersey’s public utility board from 2019 until 2023 under outgoing Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy.

“Data centers aren’t always great neighbors,” said Silverman, now a researcher at Johns Hopkins University. “They tend to be loud, they can be dirty and there’s a number of communities, particularly in places with really high concentrations of data centers, that just don’t want more data centers.”

Virginia, Ohio and Illinois

Looking at the top fives states for data centers can help sort out some of the politics of data centers from what is actually happening to electricity prices.

Virginia, Illinois and Ohio are among those states and are mostly served by the same grid operator, PJM Interconnection. PJM is the largest grid in the U.S., serving more than 65 million people across 13 states including New Jersey where Silverman advised the state utility board.

The PJM grid is facing a major imbalance between demand and supply. It holds auctions to secure electric capacity from power plants to ensure the grid remains reliable. The auction for 2024 to 2025 resulted in a bill of $2.2 billion. The bill then surged more than 500% to $14.7 billion for 2025 to 2026.

An independent watchdog that monitors those PJM auctions found that data center demand, actual and forecast, made up $9.3 billion, or 63% of the total power capacity bill for 2025 to 2026. In the latest auction, prices jumped another 10% to $16.1 billion.

“Data center load growth is the primary reason for recent and expected capacity market conditions, including total forecast load growth, the tight supply and demand balance, and high prices,” the firm Monitoring Analytics said in its June Independent Market Monitor report.

Those capacity prices get passed down to consumers in their utility bills, Silverman said. The data center load in PJM is also impacting prices in states that are not industry leaders such as New Jersey, where prices jumped about 20% year over year. Democrat Mikie Sherrill won the governor’s race in the Garden State in part on promising to freeze electric bill increases.

“It is an extremely large component of the affordability crisis we’re experiencing right now,” Silverman said of data center impact on capacity prices.

There are other reasons for rising electricity prices, Silverman said. The aging electric grid needs upgrades at a time of broad inflation and the cost of building new transmission lines has gone up by double digits, he said.

The utilities also point to rising demand from the expansion of domestic manufacturing and the broader electrification of the economy, such as electric vehicles and the adoption of electric heat pumps in some regions.

Although some Democrats are blaming the White House, the conditions that led to rising electricity prices in the PJM region began before the second Trump administration took office.

PJM’s process for bringing new electric supply online has “crashed and burned,” Silverman said. Tax subsidies under the Inflation Reduction Act led to a surge of renewable energy projects waiting for grid connection. PJM is struggling to keep up with approvals, which can take five years in some cases, he said.

PJM’s watchdog said the grid may have seen tight power supplies without data centers, but the demand growth would have been slower and allowed more time for the market to address it.

“It is misleading to assert that the capacity market results are simply just a reflection of supply and demand,” the watchdog said, describing the rapid load growth from data centers as “unprecedented.”

Trump promised to cut electricity prices in half during his first year in office. That has not happened and is unlikely to happen in the coming years due to tight supply and demand.

“It’s hard to see utility bills coming down in this decade,” said Rob Gramlich, president of Grid Strategies, a power sector consulting firm.

Texas and California

In other states, however, the relationship between rising electricity prices and data centers is less clear. Texas, for example, is second only to Virginia with more than 400 data centers. But prices in the Lone Star state increased about 4% year over year in August, lower than the national average.

Texas operates its own grid, ERCOT, with a relatively fast process that can connect new electric supply to the grid in around three years, according to a February 2024 report from the Brattle Group.

California, meanwhile, has the third most data centers in the nation and the second highest residential electricity prices, nearly 80% above the national average. But prices in the Golden State increased about 1% in August 2024 over the prior year period, far below the average hike nationwide.

One of the reasons California’s electricity rates are so much higher than most of the country is the costs associated with preventing wildfires. PG&E, the largest utility in the state, said in March that it expects rates to remain stable this year as costs associated with wildfire prevention are taken out of customers’ bills.

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Vice Chair and President at Microsoft, Brad Smith, participates in the first day of Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal, on November 12, 2024. The largest technology conference in the world this year has 71,528 attendees from 153 countries and 3,050 companies, with AI emerging as the most represented industry. (Photo by Rita Franca/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Nurphoto | Nurphoto | Getty Images

Microsoft plans to spend $80 billion in fiscal 2025 on the construction of data centers that can handle artificial intelligence workloads, the company said in a Friday blog post. 

Over half of the expected AI infrastructure spending will take place in the U.S., Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith wrote. Microsoft’s 2025 fiscal year ends in June. 

“Today, the United States leads the global AI race thanks to the investment of private capital and innovations by American companies of all sizes, from dynamic start-ups to well-established enterprises,” Smith said. “At Microsoft, we’ve seen this firsthand through our partnership with OpenAI, from rising firms such as Anthropic and xAI, and our own AI-enabled software platforms and applications.”

Several top-tier technology companies are rushing to spend billions on Nvidia graphics processing units for training and running AI models. The fast spread of OpenAI’s ChatGPT assistant, which launched in late 2022, kicked off the AI race for companies to deliver their own generative AI capabilities. Having invested more than $13 billion in OpenAI, Microsoft provides cloud infrastructure to the startup and has incorporated its models into Windows, Teams and other products.

Microsoft reported $20 billion in capital expenditures and assets acquired under finance leases worldwide, with $14.9 billion spent on property and equipment, in the first quarter of fiscal 2025. Capital expenditures will increase sequentially in the fiscal second quarter, Microsoft Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood said in October.

Analysts surveyed by Visible Alpha were looking for $63.2 billion in additions to property and equipment in fiscal 2025, implying 42% year-over-year growth.

Microsoft’s revenue from Azure and other cloud services increased 33% in the fiscal first quarter, with 12 percentage points stemming from AI services.

Smith called on President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming administration to protect the country’s leadership in AI through education and the promotion of U.S. AI technologies abroad.

“China is starting to offer developing countries subsidized access to scarce chips, and it’s promising to build local AI data centers,” Smith wrote. “The Chinese wisely recognize that if a country standardizes on China’s AI platform, it likely will continue to rely on that platform in the future.”

He added, “The best response for the United States is not to complain about the competition but to ensure we win the race ahead. This will require that we move quickly and effectively to promote American AI as a superior alternative.”

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