Mustafa Suleyman opened his MIT Technology Review essay with a crisp diagnosis of the problem: we evolved for a linear world, and that makes us catastrophically bad at perceiving exponential change. The argument flows cleanly from there.

Suleyman, who co-founded DeepMind and now runs Microsoft AI, has been inside the compute curve since 2010. By his count, the amount of training data going into frontier models has grown by a trillion times over that period—from roughly 10¹⁴ floating-point operations to numbers that require scientific notation to state without embarrassment. The skeptics who keep predicting a wall keep being wrong, he argues, not because they misunderstand the individual constraints (Moore’s Law deceleration, data exhaustion, energy limits) but because they underestimate how many parallel levers the industry is pulling simultaneously.

Microsoft, Google, Amazon and other major tech companies are locking in contracts with nuclear startups to secure reliable power for AI data centers. The rationale is straightforward: AI infrastructure runs continuously, consumes enormous amounts of electricity, and needs stable baseload power that solar and wind can’t reliably provide without storage that doesn’t yet exist at sufficient scale. Nuclear, which had been commercially stagnant for decades, is suddenly the destination of serious capital.

Microsoft announced a $10 billion investment in Japan spanning 2026 through 2029 — AI infrastructure, cybersecurity partnerships, and a commitment to train over one million engineers and workers by 2030.

It’s the follow-on to a $2.9 billion investment in April 2024. The new package is organized around three pillars: Technology, Trust, and Talent. Microsoft is also joining Japan’s Kyushu Semiconductor Human Resource Development Consortium — the first major international tech company to do so.