When Meta announced its US$2 billion acquisition of AI startup Manus, it was meant to be a victory lap for CEO Mark Zuckerberg. By bringing what it billed as the world's most advanced agentic AI under the Meta umbrella, the social media giant was expected to leapfrog OpenAI and Google. Instead, the deal has become a flashpoint for geopolitical tension. According to The New York Times and Alpha Spread, the acquisition is now entangled in investigations over "Singapore washing" and questions about the origins of its digital infrastructure.

Amid tightening memory supply and surging demand for AI-ready infrastructure, hardware vendors are racing to redesign systems for the next phase of enterprise AI adoption — a shift thrown into sharp relief at Nvidia's GTC 2026.

On March 17, IBM completed its acquisition of Confluent, Inc., the data streaming platform used by more than 6,500 enterprises — including 40% of the Fortune 500 — to power real-time operations. Under the agreement, IBM acquired all issued and outstanding common shares of Confluent for US$31 per share in cash, representing an enterprise value of approximately US$11 billion.

OpenAI has signed an agreement with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to provide its artificial intelligence tools to US government agencies for both classified and unclassified work, according to The Information and Reuters, as the company steps up efforts to secure defense and public-sector contracts.

At GTC 2026, Nvidia outlined a dual-track approach combining copper cables and silicon photonics (SiPh) to meet surging AI-driven demand for data center interconnects. CEO Jensen Huang emphasized that as AI compute needs escalate, future data centers will require expanded capacity across copper cabling, optical communication, and co-packaged optics (CPO) — establishing optical-copper parallelism as the industry's defining development path.

On March 18, Foxconn (Hon Hai) announced a strategic partnership with SAP to accelerate the adoption of next-generation enterprise artificial intelligence across the Asia-Pacific region. The collaboration is built on the AI Factory initiative, which Foxconn says seeks to reshape future manufacturing processes and supply chain management while opening pathways for global deployment.

The US Army has signed a sweeping corporate contract with defense tech startup Anduril Industries, valued at up to US$20 billion over 10 years. Covering software, hardware, infrastructure, and related support services, the deal underscores the Pentagon's aggressive push to integrate Silicon Valley technologies and innovations for military modernization.

OpenAI has appointed new leadership to oversee its Stargate computing initiative as the company pivots its infrastructure strategy away from building its own data centers and toward leasing capacity from cloud providers, according to people familiar with the matter, as reported by The Information.

Jensen Huang's "five-layer cake" model for AI is a tidy recipe: energy, chips, infrastructure, models, applications — stacked in order. Applied to China, the cake looks polished on top. Pull it apart, though, and the middle layers are still underbaked.

Syscom Computer Engineering showcased an "AI mobilization" theme at the 2026 Smart City Expo, integrating physical service robots with intelligent digital workers and presenting the technology as a core operational force for enterprises. The company described this integration as marking the arrival of "enterprise digital workers" — entities designed to function alongside human staff and reshape business models.