Microsoft plans to invest $10 billion in artificial intelligence infrastructure at a data centre in Portugal’s port city of Sines over the next few years, marking one of the largest AI investment projects in Europe, it said on Tuesday.

The technology giant will work in partnership with developers Start Campus, AI infrastructure platform Nscale and chipmaker NVIDIA to deploy 12,600 next-generation NVIDIA Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) in Sines, 150 km (93 miles) south of Lisbon.

Start Campus, a venture between U.S. investment fund Davidson Kempner and Britain’s Pioneer Point Partners, in April announced a plan to invest 8.5 billion euros ($9.9 billion) by 2030 in a data centre hub to serve growing demand from major tech and AI companies.

One of the planned six buildings is already in operation.

“By strengthening the national AI infrastructure through collaboration with Nscale, NVIDIA, and Start Campus, we are helping to position Portugal as a benchmark for the responsible and scalable development of AI in Europe,” Microsoft’s Vice Chair and President Brad Smith said.

Portugal has large investment projects lined up for Sines to produce green energy to power energy-intensive data centres. Portugal’s Atlantic coastline positions it as a prime hub for subsea cables connecting Europe, Africa and the Americas and forming the backbone of the World Wide Web.

Investments in data centres, which help provide computing power for AI, have surged since OpenAI launched ChatGPT in 2022, as companies across sectors increasingly shift their operations to the cloud and integrate AI into their businesses.

Nebius Group has signed a deal worth about $3 billion with Meta to provide the Facebook owner with AI infrastructure over a five-year period, the company said on Tuesday, after it reported a more than fourfold rise in third-quarter revenue.

The company’s shares seesawed in volatile premarket trading, after it posted a surge in capital spending and a quarterly loss of over $100 million, widening from $39.7 million last year.

The stock has been on a strong run this year, with its market value rising fourfold to $27.61 billion, through last close.

The agreement with Meta underscores the surging demand for high-performance computing power that is required to build and run artificial intelligence models.

It is Nebius’ second contract with a hyperscaler, following its $17.4 billion deal with Microsoft in September.

Nebius said it would deploy the capacity needed for the Meta contract over the next three months, adding that the demand was so strong that the size of the contract had to be limited to the capacity that Nebius had available.

Amsterdam-based Nebius is among a group of so-called neocloud companies that offer hardware and cloud capacity as services. Its core business involves providing Nvidia graphics processing units and AI cloud, helping companies expand their AI infrastructure.

Nebius and its larger rival CoreWeave have seen strong demand this year as insatiable AI appetite has left even the biggest cloud companies, such as Microsoft and Amazon, with capacity constraints.

Nebius reported a 355% jump in revenue to $146.1 million in the third quarter ended September.

The company is targeting $7 billion to $9 billion in annualized run-rate revenue by the end of 2026, compared with its ARR of about $551 million at September-end.

Its capital expenditures ballooned to $955.5 million in the September quarter, from $172.1 million a year earlier, as the company invests heavily in securing GPUs, land and power.

Meta’s chief artificial intelligence scientist Yann LeCun is planning to leave the social media company to set up his own startup, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter.

LeCun is also in early talks to raise funds for a new venture, according to the report.

The owner of Facebook and Instagram has significantly increased its investments in artificial intelligence, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg reorganizing the company’s AI initiatives under Superintelligence Labs.

Zuckerberg hired Alexandr Wang, former CEO of data labeling startup Scale AI to lead the new AI effort.

As a result, LeCun, who had reported to chief product officer Chris Cox, is now reporting to Wang, the report said.

Meta and LeCun did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment.

SoftBank Group’s $5.8 billion sale of its Nvidia stake jolted stock markets on Tuesday, stoking fears that the frenzy around artificial intelligence may have peaked, especially after recent warnings from Wall Street bank chiefs and a famed short seller.

In its quarterly results, the Japanese tech investor said it had sold all the 32.1 million Nvidia shares it held in October to bankroll CEO Masayoshi Son’s sweeping AI push, built around his “all in” bet on ChatGPT-creator OpenAI. SoftBank needs the proceeds for initiatives including the $500 billion Stargate project to expand U.S. data-center capacity and as much as $40 billion funding pledged to OpenAI, whose financing details were not given with the announcements.

But the timing of its sale deepened some investor doubts that valuations in the AI industry might have gotten ahead of fundamentals. Nvidia shares were down more than 2% in early trading, weighing on the benchmark S&P 500 index. Adding to the jitters was a revenue forecast cut from AI cloud provider CoreWeave over a contract delay that sent its stock down 9%. Drumbeats of an AI bubble grew louder in recent weeks after Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs CEOs warned equities could be heading to a drawdown, while hedge fund manager Michael Burry, known for shorts on the U.S. housing market ahead of the 2008 crash, bet against Nvidia and Palantir.

Several analysts said the sale suggested Son – one of tech’s most audacious investors – sees the blistering rally that turned Nvidia into the first $5 trillion company last month cooling after a more than 1,200% surge in the past three years.

But a few of them pointed to SoftBank’s patchy record managing its Nvidia holdings. The company, by some estimates, missed out on a more than $100 billion rally in Nvidia shares by selling it off in 2019 before the AI boom took off, only to later buy the chipmaker’s shares again.

“As for timing, cannot say Masayoshi Son has been great with his trading of Nvidia shares,” said C J Muse, senior managing director at Cantor Fitzgerald. “It appears simply resource allocation – finding funds to make bets elsewhere.”

OPENAI FOCUS, SON’S GROWING WARCHEST

Along with the Nvidia share sale, SoftBank sold around $9.2 billion worth of shares in T-Mobile, providing Son with a larger money chest to stamp his influence on an industry hungry for the capital and chips needed to fund the pursuit of AI technology that can match or surpass human intelligence.

“By cashing in now, he’s securing the capital needed to double down on his conviction in AI applications and the super-scaled infrastructure behind them, OpenAI, Oracle and the Stargate project,” said Michael Ashley Schulman, chief investment officer at Running Point Capital Advisors. But the rising bet on OpenAI also ties SoftBank, which has taken massive losses on its Vision Fund investments, closer to the startup at the center of a series of circular deals that have fueled worries about the bubble.

The Japanese company’s stock, which has surged more than twofold this year, is getting priced more and more based on its exposure to OpenAI. The stock jumped last month on news of a sweeping OpenAI restructuring that frees the startup from its non-profit roots. The startup is considering a $1 trillion public listing as soon as next year, which could be a big windfall for investors such as Microsoft and SoftBank, Reuters has reported.

The rising valuation of OpenAI also boosted SoftBank’s second-quarter net profit, which more than doubled.

But OpenAI has not given any clear details on how it plans to fund its AI infrastructure deals that total around $1.4 trillion.

It expects to finish the year with $20 billion in annual recurring revenue and recently walked back comments on need for government-backed loans.

“The Vision Fund’s checkered past certainly lends an air of high-stakes poker to this divestment,” Schulman said.

Apple will not release the next version of the iPhone Air in the fall of 2026 as previously planned, amid weak sales, the Information reported on Monday, citing sources familiar with the matter.

The company launched the iPhone Air in 2025 as a thinner and lighter alternative within its flagship iPhone portfolio. The model, with a slim design, came with some trade-offs in terms of battery size and camera features.

Apple did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment. Reuters could not independently verify the report.

Analysts said demand for the iPhone Air has been weaker than originally anticipated.

In October, the company said the iPhone Air would be available for pre-order in China, following regulatory approval for eSIM services by those telecom operators.

The iPhone Air is being sold in China without a physical SIM tray, supporting only eSIM connectivity.