Good morning. Enterprise and global AI spending is widely expected to climb in 2026, driven by expanding AI infrastructure and the broader adoption of AI software and devices. Rather than being concentrated only among top tech giants, investment is increasingly coming from a wider base of enterprises.
Gartner forecasts global AI spending to exceed $2 trillion in 2026, led by the integration of AI into products such as smartphones, PCs, and other underlying infrastructure. Regional economic conditions, regulatory environments, and access to skilled talent will influence how quickly individual companies scale their initiatives. Not every company will commit to large hardware upgrades or wide deployment at the same pace.
To understand how the market is shaping up, I asked Dan Ives, a managing director and senior equity research analyst at Wedbush Securities, for his view. “We believe 2026 will be the year of AI monetization as the infrastructure leads to the use cases for enterprises and consumers,” Ives told me. “This is just the beginning, and we expect a bullish 2026 for tech and the AI Revolution.”
Wedbush analysts wrote in a Monday morning note that they are seeing AI-related business ramp up faster recently, and that this momentum should carry into 2026 as end-user enterprises fast-track deployments. The analysts also reject the idea that the market is showing signs of an AI bubble, emphasizing instead that adoption remains in the very early stages as CIOs and business leaders determine where AI can deliver meaningful value in their organizations.
Deloitte’s recent report similarly anticipates continued and rising AI spending in sectors such as tech, media, and telecom, but emphasizes that the focus will shift from experimentation to execution. “New foundational models, or even shiny new enterprise agentic applications, continue to impress—but translating those beyond pilots and trials requires work that’s typically considered less exciting, like data hygiene, integration into existing workflows, governance, new pricing models, and regulatory compliance,” according to the report.
These forecasts point to a common inflection point: 2026 will be less about dazzling new AI models and more about turning existing capabilities into measurable business results.
Amanda Brimmer was appointed CFO of leasing advisory and head of corporate development at JLL (No. 188), a global commercial real estate and investment management company. Reporting to JLL CFO Kelly Howe, Brimmer will partner with business leaders globally to drive financial growth and performance. Brimmer brings more than two decades of experience from Boston Consulting Group, where she most recently served as managing director and senior partner.
Galagher Jeff was appointed EVP and CFO of ARKO Corp. (No. 488), one of the largest convenience store operators and fuel wholesalers in the U.S., effective Dec. 1. Jeff most recently served as EVP and CFO for Murphy USA, Inc. Before that, he spent nearly 15 years in senior and executive finance roles with retailers, including Dollar Tree Stores, Inc., Advance Auto Parts, Inc. and Walmart Stores, Inc., in addition to a decade-long career in finance and strategy consulting at organizations including KPMG and Ernst & Young.
Every Friday morning, the weekly Fortune 500 Power Moves column tracks Fortune 500 company C-suite shifts—see the most recent edition.
More notable moves
Nick Tressler was appointed CFO of Vistagen (Nasdaq: VTGN), a late clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company, effective Dec. 1. Tressler brings over 20 years of financial leadership experience. Most recently, he served as CFO of DYNEX Technologies, and before that, he was the CFO at American Gene Technologies, International, and Senseonics Holdings, Inc. Tressler has also held senior finance roles at several biopharmaceutical companies.
Charlie Dowling was appointed CFO of Revive Infrastructure Group, a utility infrastructure services provider. Dowling brings to the company more than 30 years of experience. He began his career in public accounting with Arthur Andersen, and later advanced through senior financial leadership roles across the construction, manufacturing, and industrial sectors.
Big Deal
E*TRADE from Morgan Stanley’s monthly analysis found that in November the firm’s clients were net buyers in 10 of 11 S&P 500 sectors—and all signs pointed to them buying the tech dip, especially in some of the market’s megacap AI leaders, according to Chris Larkin, managing director of trading and investing. The top-three sectors for net buying activity were consumer discretionary (+13.41%), utilities (+7.35%), and communication services (+4.9%). Tech was close behind at +4.65%.
“A good deal of the activity in the utilities sector again appeared to be driven by ‘risk-on’ buying in the alt-energy space rather than defensive purchases of traditional utility stocks,” Larkin noted. “And for the second month in a row, clients rotated away from strength in the health care sector.”
Courtesy of E*TRADE
Going deeper
“How AI’s persuasion style mirrors humans” is the latest episode of Wharton’s Ripple Effect podcast. Wharton Professor Ethan Mollick discusses how AI systems respond to Robert Cialdini’s principles of persuasion, such as authority, reciprocity, and commitment. The episode explores why certain nudges make guardrails more flexible, how larger models show stronger resistance to influence, and how insights from social psychology reveal the emerging “para-human” nature of AI.
Overheard
“My belief in the power of connection has shaped much of my personal life and professional career.”
—DavidRisher, chief executive officer of Lyft, writes in a Fortune opinion piece titled, “Lyft CEO: This Giving Tuesday, I’m matching every rider’s donation.”
Big Tech’s AI arms race is fueling a massive investment surge in data centers with construction worker labor valued at a premium.
Despite some concerns of an AI bubble, data center hyperscalers like Google, Amazon, and Meta continue to invest heavily into AI infrastructure. In effect, construction workers’ salaries are being inflated to satisfy a seemingly insatiable AI demand, experts tell Fortune.
In 2026 alone, upwards of $100 billion could be invested by tech companies into the data center buildout in the U.S., Raul Martynek, the CEO of DataBank, a company that contracts with tech giants to construct data centers, told Fortune.
In November, Bank of Americaestimated global hyperscale spending is rising 67% in 2025 and another 31% in 2026, totaling a massive $611 billion investment for the AI buildout in just two years.
Given the high demand, construction workers are experiencing a pay bump for data center projects.
Construction projects generally operate on tight margins, with clients being very cost-conscious, Fraser Patterson, CEO of Skillit, an AI-powered hiring platform for construction workers, told Fortune.
But some of the top 50 contractors by size in the country have seen their revenue double in a 12-month period based on data center construction, which is allowing them to pay their workers more, according to Patterson.
“Because of the huge demand and the nature of this construction work, which is fueling the arms race of AI… the budgets are not as tight,” he said. “I would say they’re a little more frothy.”
On Skillit, the average salary for construction projects that aren’t building data centers is $62,000, or $29.80 an hour, Patterson said. The workers that use the platform comprise 40 different trades and have a wide range of experience from heavy equipment operators to electricians, with eight years as the average years of experience.
But when it comes to data centers, the same workers make an average salary of $81,800 or $39.33 per hour, Patterson said, increasing salaries by just under 32% on average.
Some construction workers are even hitting the six-figure mark after their salaries rose for data center projects, according to The Wall Street Journal. And the data center boom doesn’t show any signs it’s slowing down anytime soon.
Tech companies like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft operate 522 data centers and are developing 411 more, according to The Wall Street Journal, citing data from Synergy Research Group.
Patterson said construction workers are being paid more to work on building data centers in part due to condensed project timelines, which require complex coordination or machinery and skilled labor.
Projects that would usually take a couple of years to finish are being completed—in some instances—as quickly as six months, he said.
It is unclear how long the data center boom might last, but Patterson said it has in part convinced a growing number of Gen Z workers and recent college grads to choose construction trades as their career path.
“AI is creating a lot of job anxiety around knowledge workers,” Patterson said. “Construction work is, by definition, very hard to automate.”
“I think you’re starting to see a change in the labor market,” he added.
Reed Hastings may soon pull off one of the biggest deals in entertainment history. On Thursday, Netflix announced plans to acquire Warner Bros.—home to franchises like Dune, Harry Potter, and DC Universe, along with streamer HBO Max—in a total enterprise value deal of $83 billion. The move is set to cement Netflix as a media juggernaut that now rivals the legacy Hollywood giants it once disrupted.
It’s a remarkable trajectory for Netflix’s cofounder, Hastings—a self-made billionaire who found a love for business starting as a teenage door-to-door salesperson.
“I took a year off between high school and college and sold Rainbow vacuum cleaners door to door,” Hastings recalled to The New York Timesin 2006. “I started it as a summer job and found I liked it. As a sales pitch, I cleaned the carpet with the vacuum the customer had and then cleaned it with the Rainbow.”
That scrappy sales job was the first exposure to how to properly read customers—an instinct that would later shape Netflix’s user-obsessed culture. After graduating from Bowdoin College in 1983, Hastings considered joining the Marine Corps but ultimately joined the Peace Corps, teaching math in Eswatini for two years. When he returned to the U.S., he obtained a master’s in computer science from Stanford and began his career in tech.
The idea for Netflix reportedly came a few years later in the late 1990s. After misplacing a VHS copy of Apollo 13 and getting hit with a $40 late fee at Blockbuster, Hastings began exploring a mail-order rental service. While it’s an origin story that has since been debated, it marked the start of a company that would reshape global entertainment.
Hastings stepped back as CEO in 2023 and now serves as Netflix’s chairman of the board. He has amassed a net worth of about $5.6 billion. He’d be even richer if he didn’t keep offloading his shares in the company and making record-breaking charitable donations.
Netflix’s secret for success: finding the right people
Hastings has long said that one of the biggest drivers of Netflix’s success is its focus on hiring and keeping exceptional talent.
“If you’re going to win the championship, you got to have incredible talent in every position. And that’s how we think about it,” he told CNBC in 2020. “We encourage people to focus on who of your employees would you fight hard to keep if they were going to another company? And those are the ones we want to hold onto.”
To secure top performers, Hastings said he was more than willing to pay for above-market rates.
“With a fixed amount of money for salaries and a project I needed to complete, I had a choice: Hire 10 to 25 average engineers, or hire one ‘rock-star’ and pay significantly more than what I’d pay the others, if necessary,” Hastings wrote. “Over the years, I’ve come to see that the best programmer doesn’t add 10 times the value. He or she adds more like a 100 times.”
That mindset also guided Netflix’s leadership transition. When Hastings stepped back from the C-suite, the company didn’t pick a single successor—it picked two. Greg Peters joined Ted Sarandos as co-CEO in 2023.
“It’s a high-performance technique,” Hastings said, speaking about the co-CEO model. “It’s not for most situations and most companies. But if you’ve got two people that work really well together and complement and extend and trust each other, then it’s worth doing.”
Netflix’s stock has soared more than 80,000% since its IPO in 2002, adjusting for stock splits.
Netflix brought unlimited PTO into the mainstream
Netflix’s flexible workplace culture has also played a key role in its success, with Hastings often known for prioritizing time off to recharge.
“I take a lot of vacation, and I’m hoping that certainly sets an example,” the former CEO said in 2015. “It is helpful. You often do your best thinking when you’re off hiking in some mountain or something. You get a different perspective on things.”
The company was one of the first to introduce unlimited PTO, a policy that many firms have since adopted. About 57% of retail investors have said it could improve overall company performance, according to a survey by Bloomberg. Critics have argued that such policies can backfire when employees feel guilty taking time off, but Hastings has maintained that freedom is core to Netflix’s identity.
“We are fundamentally dedicated to employee freedom because that makes us more flexible, and we’ve had to adapt so much back from DVD by mail to leading streaming today,” Hastings said. “If you give employees freedom you’ve got a better chance at that success.”
“For over thirty years, I had a hard cut-off on Tuesdays. Rain or shine, I left at exactly 5 p.m. and spent the evening with my best friend. We would go to a movie, have dinner, or just go window-shopping downtown together,” Randolph wrote in a LinkedIn post.
“Those Tuesday nights kept me sane. And they put the rest of my work in perspective.”
The spots gave it away. Just like a human fingerprint, the rosette pattern on each jaguar is unique so researchers knew they had a new animal on their hands after reviewing images captured by a remote camera in southern Arizona.
The University of Arizona Wild Cat Research and Conservation Center says it’s the fifth big cat over the last 15 years to be spotted in the area after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. The animal was captured by the camera as it visited a watering hole in November, its distinctive spots setting it apart from previous sightings.
“We’re very excited. It signifies this edge population of jaguars continues to come here because they’re finding what they need,” Susan Malusa, director of the center’s jaguar and ocelot project, said during an interview Thursday.
The team is now working to collect scat samples to conduct genetic analysis and determine the sex and other details about the new jaguar, including what it likes to eat. The menu can include everything from skunks and javelina to small deer.
As an indicator species, Malusa said the continued presence of big cats in the region suggests a healthy landscape but that climate change and border barriers can threaten migratory corridors. She explained that warming temperatures and significant drought increase the urgency to ensure connectivity for jaguars with their historic range in Arizona.
More than 99% of the jaguar’s range is found in Central and South America, and the few male jaguars that have been spotted in the U.S. are believed to have dispersed from core populations in Mexico, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Officials have said that jaguar breeding in the U.S. has not been documented in more than 100 years.
Federal biologists have listed primary threats to the endangered species as habitat loss and fragmentation along with the animals being targeted for trophies and illegal trade.
The Fish and Wildlife Service issued a final rule in 2024, revising the habitat set aside for jaguars in response to a legal challenge. The area was reduced to about 1,000 square miles (2,590 square kilometers) in Arizona’s Pima, Santa Cruz and Cochise counties.
Recent detection data supports findings that a jaguar appears every few years, Malusa said, with movement often tied to the availability of water. When food and water are plentiful, there’s less movement.
In the case of Jaguar #5, she said it was remarkable that the cat kept returning to the area over a 10-day period. Otherwise, she described the animals as quite elusive.
“That’s the message — that this species is recovering,” Malusa said. “We want people to know that and that we still do have a chance to get it right and keep these corridors open.”
Politics8 years ago