Editor’s note: I’m in the habit of bookmarking on LinkedIn and X, and in actual books, things I think are insightful and interesting. These days a lot of those things are about AI infrastructure but, more generally, those things are about how technology is reshaping our world. What I’m not in the habit of doing is ever revisiting those insightful, interesting bits of commentary and doing anything with them that would benefit anyone other than myself. This weekly column is an effort to correct that.
We are in the midst of a great convergence—artificial intelligence (AI), once considered an abstract layer of software, is now a driving force reshaping not only our technological capabilities, but also the physical infrastructure of the world—and the way we lead and learn within it.
From data center buildouts and digital twins to executive mindsets and future readiness, three industry leaders—Microsoft’s Noelle Walsh, Cisco’s Jeetu Patel, and NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang—offer a glimpse into the transformational moment we’re in. Together, their commentary sketches a future where the agility, scale, and sustainability of AI infrastructure is inseparable from leadership, culture, and AI literacy.
The AI infrastructure surge is not speculative; it’s demand-driven
At Microsoft, the scale of AI infrastructure investment tells its own story. “In the last three years, we’ve doubled datacenter capacity,” Noelle Walsh, President of Microsoft Cloud Operations + Innovation, wrote on LinkedIn. “We expect to have another record year in 2025, and our global footprint continues to expand, across 60+ regions and 350+ datacenters worldwide.” She noted that Microsoft is on track to spend more than $80 billion in 2024 alone on infrastructure—figures that would have seemed implausible just a few years ago.
These investments are not arbitrary. They are demand-driven. “In recent years, demand for our cloud and AI services grew more than we could have ever anticipated,” Walsh wrote. “To meet this opportunity, we began executing the largest and most ambitious infrastructure scaling project in our history.”
Microsoft isn’t alone. At GTC 2025, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang demonstrated how the company’s Omniverse Blueprint and partnerships with Cadence, Schneider Electric, and Vertiv enabled engineers to design a 1-gigawatt data center—what Huang called an “AI gigafactory.” He emphasized how digital twins now let engineering teams “communicate instructions to the large body of teams and suppliers, reducing execution errors and accelerating time to bring up capacity.”
This is no longer just about racks and real estate. It’s about a new design philosophy: collaborative, simulation-driven, and software-defined. These are data centers as living systems—dynamic things that are optimized not just for compute, but for agility and sustainability. But even the most advanced gigafactory won’t future-proof a company if its people, culture, and leadership don’t evolve at the same pace
Today, human > AI. But in the future, human + AI > human
AI infrastructure is only part of the story. AI isn’t just changing what we build and how it build it—it’s changing how we lead and work. Cisco’s EVP and Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel put it bluntly: “There will only be two kinds of companies that will exist in the future. Those that will be AI-forward companies and others who will discount AI and struggle for relevance.”
In a powerful reflection on leadership in the age of multi-vector transformation, Patel challenged the conventional wisdom that has historically governed business decisions. “Sometimes, extremely rational people can make very logical decisions for exactly the right ethical reasons—and those decisions end up killing companies,” he wrote, referencing Blockbuster’s refusal to pivot from late fees to subscriptions. Rational, ethical, logical—and fatal.
The message? Don’t be rationally skeptical in the face of a mega-trend. “It is now irrational to not be going full speed in AI adoption,” Patel wrote. “Even if you see challenges with AI, don’t use those challenges as justifications for not learning how to use AI.”
In other words, the work is no longer just technical—it’s personal. The responsibility for transformation no longer rests only with IT or the C-suite; it belongs to every individual. “Let’s become extremely curious about the change happening in society with AI,” Patel urged. “Let’s also have a willingness to be shaped by the movement that is AI.”
Convergence is the new default
This is what makes this moment so unique: the deep interdependence of AI infrastructure, software, leadership, and learning. Companies like Microsoft and NVIDIA are building the physical foundation for an AI-first economy. But it’s leaders like Patel who are highlighting the human foundation—adaptability and curiosity.
The convergence of these forces—AI infrastructure, digitally twinned design, and AI-forward leadership—signals a new default for enterprises. One where software doesn’t just run on hardware, but defines how it is designed. One where agility isn’t a metric, but a mindset. One where the only rational response is to get irrationally ambitious. Because the future won’t be built in silos. It will be co-created—by AI and people working together.
For a big-picture breakdown of both the how and the why of AI infrastructure, including 2025 hyperscaler capex guidance, the rise of edge AI, the push to artificial general intelligence (AGI), and more, check out this long read.
