The Daily Receipts

After briefly nearly closing in 2024, the performance gap between the best closed-weight and open-weight AI models widened again on the Arena leaderboard. As of March 2026, Stanford's 2026 AI Index finds the top closed model leads the top open model by 3.3%, up from a 0.5% lead in August 2024

In its Annual Energy Outlook 2026, the US Energy Information Administration projects that electricity used by data-center servers alone will grow from an estimated 7% of commercial-sector electricity in 2025 to 22%–33% of commercial building electricity by 2050

Equinix, the world's largest data-center REIT, raised its full-year outlook after a strong second quarter and guided total 2026 capital expenditures — the spend that builds AI, cloud and interconnection capacity — to $5.0 billion to $6.0 billion in 2026 capex

AI server demand for HBM and high-capacity server DRAM has driven memory makers' sales so hard that TrendForce pegs total DRAM industry revenue in the second quarter of 2026 at nearly $154.73 billion, up 59.5% quarter-over-quarter

HBM supply is so tight that TrendForce says the memory feeding Nvidia's next-generation AI GPUs will keep getting pricier through 2027. The research firm's 29 September 2026 outlook now projects HBM's blended average selling price next year to rise, year-over-year, by 121%

Epoch AI's Frontier Data Centers Hub tracks AI data-centre construction using satellite imagery and public filings. It estimates xAI's Colossus 2, the most powerful AI data centre operating in 2026 at 1.4 million H100-equivalents, will be dwarfed once Meta's Hyperion and Microsoft's Fairwater are complete, when the two will together reach 5 million H100-equivalent GPUs combined, once Meta's Hyperion and Microsoft's Fairwater data centres are complete