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From the newsletter (September 18; sign-up or follow if you want it sooner): AI may be making telecoms look increasingly central to the next digital economy, but updates on the IRIS² satellite project, Zayo’s fiber supplies, and data center and other physical-AI stories underline a simpler truth: infrastructure still has to be built.
Got to be quick; I’m hiking Edale Skyline this weekend, and I have a long drive ahead, and traffic is building up. So what do we have this Friday? Funny thing: AI keeps making the telecoms industry sound important, while reminding everyone at the same time that infrastructure is still, stubbornly, just infrastructure – with all the money and sweat that entails. Europe is spending €15.6bn on IRIS² because sovereign connectivity still means satellites, launchers, ground stations, and industrial capacity. Zayo is locking down fiber supply with Corning years ahead of demand because AI infrastructure cannot be built without glass, ducts, permits, and a whole bunch of digging.
Oracle, with all its AI eggs in one basket, is delivering hundreds of thousands of GPUs, but says the constraint has moved from chips to power and capacity. And a level up, there is physical AI, agentic AI, and a gnarly issue with uplink bandwidth. If machines are the users on the network, sending sensor data and operational intent upstream (rather than just downloading content, as discussed yesterday), then the architecture has to change. Sean’s posts this week make that point: 6G is increasingly framed around sensing, compute, determinism, and machines acting in the real world – again, way before any of the traffic has arrived.
Which is the discipline, of course: build it, and they might come, and they might even pay for it. We argued before – and this shows, as much, that you can make an argument about anything – that ‘telecoms’ is becoming ‘AI’, such is the scale of the construction project to connect the developing AI economy. But that is only one way of looking at it. Really, AI is making the physical world matter again – machines, cameras, sensors; masts, rockets, satellites, radios; networks, cables, dirt. And somebody still has to build it all – so a new digital world emerges on top, and the physical is invisible again. Which is a measure of success, after all. But there are a lot of hills and valleys to walk to get that view across the Peaks.
