The Year in Review - the year in Infrastructure

It's been a crazy year for digital infrastructure with trillions of dollars promises for new AI data centers, associated bubbles, the dawn of agents, and significant progress in adjacent standards, tools and processes.

Massive growth in planned AI infrastructure has driven massive growth in AI stocks. The bubble almost burst, but didn’t – yet. Meanwhile, MCP for Agentic AI integration has sparked developer enthusiasm not seen since the early days of mashups and Web 2.0. Investors, regulators and Big Tech are all looking for ways to grow AI like the early Internet, which turned out not to be a sure thing.

A bevy of new standards, techniques and a promising alternative to neural networks for the spatial web and reality capture are helping close the gap between AI and the physical world. Also, there is not enough power and water for those new data centers, but maybe there ...