Top Stories for the Week of Jan 7th: xAI & massive AI infrastructure investments
Enterprise AI Briefing for the Week of Jan 7th through 13th.
A visible split is forming between organizations learning to run AI as an enterprise capability and those still deploying it like traditional technology, use case by use case.
Speaking of splitting in two, things have been challenging here in Minneapolis. I'll leave it at that.
Key AI headlines from last week
xAI & massive AI infrastructure investment
Musk’s xAI to invest over $20 billion in Mississippi data center read
JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon on AI spending
Jamie Dimon says JPMorgan has to invest in AI or risk getting “left behind” ArticleInvestor rotation from big tech to infrastructure & energyInvestors back energy providers over big tech for 2026 AI bets, says BlackRock Article
The through-line across these headlines is this.
Large organizations chasing "AI-native" status are making massive infrastructure investments to build capacity at scale.
We've seen this before, too. In the cloud era, companies raced to stockpile GPUs - 40% of which sat unused because the organization wasn't set up to use them.
Learning from history, we see that technical capacity turns out to be only half the battle.
Without the organizational capability to wield it, the investment is difficult to translate into P&L performance.
The same dynamic is playing out now. Organizations need more than pilots, procurement, and "change management"—but a deep rework of operating models, workflows, and teams.
From our work…
We recently partnered with a $4B insurer whose innovation division had built strong momentum. Experimentation was thriving and cultural openness to GenAI was high, but execution readiness hadn't kept pace.
We built the capability development roadmap that became their enterprise-wide model for AI-driven productivity.
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We have two capability development slots for quarter 2. If you’re curious about how we work with teams, reply directly to schedule an introduction.
Take care out there.
Megan C. Starkey | Founder, Principal
