The work of strengthening social cohesion begins with a commitment to responsible language and civility that goes beyond legislation Get our breaking news email , free app or daily news podcast As I travel the world, I am reminded again and again that the health of a society is revealed not only in its laws or its institutions but in the way its people speak to, and about, one another. My father t...
The work of strengthening social cohesion begins with a commitment to responsible language and civility that goes beyond legislation Get our breaking news email , free app or daily news podcast As I travel the world, I am reminded again and again that the health of a society is revealed not only in its laws or its institutions but in the way its people speak to, and about, one another. My father taught that nonviolence begins with language and the discipline to choose words that uplift rather than degrade, that clarify rather than distort and that build community rather than fracture it. Last month in the United States, we marked the holiday that bears his name at a time when our own social cohesion is under immense strain. The rhetoric of public life has grown sharper, more cynical and more divisive. Too often, we speak as if our neighbours are adversaries rather than fellow citizens. But this erosion of respect is not unique to America. It is a global challenge and Australia is not exempt. Continue reading...
Capital expenditures—capex, meaning the big-ticket purchases that fund the data centers, servers, and power infrastructure undergirding the AI race—is fueling record-high, multi-trillion dollar tech valuations when investors think the spending is warranted. But companies get punished when investors worry they might not see returns that justify hundreds of billions in spending. Alphabet is the late...
Capital expenditures—capex, meaning the big-ticket purchases that fund the data centers, servers, and power infrastructure undergirding the AI race—is fueling record-high, multi-trillion dollar tech valuations when investors think the spending is warranted. But companies get punished when investors worry they might not see returns that justify hundreds of billions in spending. Alphabet is the latest example. During its Wednesday fourth quarter earnings call, CEO Sundar Pichai and chief financial officer Anat Ashkenazi revealed that the $4 trillion tech giant will spend between $175 billion to $185 billion in capex in 2026, possibly doubling the $91.4 billion it spent in 2025 and a far cry from the $52.5 billion spent as recently as 2024. In Q4 alone, Alphabet’s capex investment reached $27.9 billion. The move is part of what Pichai described as maintaining a brutal pace to compete in AI, which is driving every single dominant player in the space—Alphabet, Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft, and others—to invest heavily in innovation and infrastructure in a fierce competition that shifts quarter to quarter. “We are in a very, very relentless innovation cadence, and I think we are confident about keeping that momentum as we go through 2026,” Pichai said on the company’s Q4 earnings call Wednesday. At the same time, when asked what keeps him up at night during the call, Pichai’s response showed his concern about the capex surge and the longer timeline needed to convert that investment into actual working data centers, to overcome power bottlenecks, increase chip manufacturing, and master the skills needed to make it all happen. “I think specifically at this moment, maybe the top question is definitely around compute capacity [and] all the constraints—be it power, land, supply chain constraints,” Pichai said. “How do you ramp up to meet this extraordinary demand for this moment, get our investments right for the long term, and do it all in a way that we are driving effi...