Published on LinkedIn and amitabhapte.com on 30th Nov 2025
This week in AI – Growth beyond the West Coast, global players join the AI race
Some weeks, the AI narrative feels local, shaped by a handful of companies on the US West Coast.
This was Not one of those weeks.
This was the week AI revealed its global ambitions.
Not through model releases, but through cranes, concrete, capital, and policy.
Every region moved in its own direction, and for the first time, those directions felt equally significant.
Asia moved with industrial intent.
India’s Adani Group is reportedly in talks with Google on a multi-billion-dollar data-centre partnership. India is no longer content being the world’s digital back office. It wants to be a compute power in its own right.
Japan, meanwhile, approved Micron’s $96B semiconductor project, not a press release, but a generational bet on the Indo-Pacific becoming the world’s memory and materials corridor.
China took a different route.
Alibaba didn’t just talk about AI; it shipped it, Quark AI glasses and a cloud business now lifted by real workloads. China may not be leading the frontier-model race, but it is winning the deployment race. Intelligence at the edge, not just the cloud.
Africa showed the geopolitics beneath the ambition.
A WSJ investigation revealed Chinese firms now control nearly half of Africa’s IPv4 addresses. This is not an obscure technical footnote. In an AI-driven world, whoever controls the pipes controls the possibilities.
Europe leaned into its slow. steady. deliberate. advantage.
A new CNBC analysis suggests Europe’s measured approach may age better than Silicon Valley’s “move fast” doctrine. Markets seem to agree, Germany’s stock market is climbing again. Siemens Energy is emerging as one of Europe’s biggest beneficiaries of the AI-driven infrastructure boom with nearly a 100B Euro valuation.
The UK added its own twist: Qatar invested hundreds of millions into a British quantum startup, strengthening Britain’s emerging position in the quantum race.
And Revolut’s new $75B valuation underscores something deeper: global finance is quietly becoming one of AI’s most powerful accelerators, built on software, data, and automated risk intelligence.
The Middle East kept doing what it always does. Skip the pilot. Go straight to scale.
Uber’s driverless robotaxis will now operate commercially in the UAE. Not a test. A rollout. AI is becoming lived infrastructure faster than many Western cities can regulate it.
Zoom out, and one conclusion becomes impossible to ignore.
“AI is no longer a Western invention. It is a global construction project.”
My takeaway this weekend
AI is no longer a single race.
It’s a set of parallel movements shaped by regional ambition.
India and Japan are building the physical backbone. China is pushing intelligence into daily life. Europe is turning trust into strategy. The Middle East is deploying at city scale. Africa is emerging as the new arena for digital sovereignty. And the UK is betting on quantum, the foundational layer beneath it all.
The real question has shifted. Not “Who has the smartest model?”, but “Who can build the steadiest system around it?”
Compute, energy, policy, capital, trust this is where advantage now compounds.
AI leadership is moving from algorithms to infrastructure.
From speed to readiness.
From capability to resilience.
“The next winners won’t be the fastest movers. They’ll be the regions and leaders who can scale AI meaningfully across diverse geographies and real consumer impact.”
Beyond AI: my mindshare – the comfort of Christmas Films
This post comes just a day before December. Is it too early to think about Christmas? Perhaps. But there’s something timeless about the way certain films weave themselves into our holiday rituals.
This week, The Times published a beautiful guide to the best Christmas movies to stream, a reminder that stories can be as comforting as a warm blanket on a cold evening.
From the mischief of Elf and the tangled romances of Love Actually to the quiet grace of It’s a Wonderful Life, these films aren’t just entertainment. They are memory-makers. They carry the scent of mulled wine, the glow of fairy lights, and the soft permission to slow down.
What struck me most is how these classics endure despite infinite choice.
In a world of endless scrolling, we still return to the familiar to Bedford Falls, to Kevin McCallister’s misadventures, to the belief that hope can arrive in the most unexpected ways.“Perhaps that’s the real gift of the season: the chance to pause, revisit old stories, and let them remind us of what matte
Amitabh Apte 