Worldwide, wireless subscriber growth is experiencing robust expansion after several years of slower growth due to the economic downturn of the last few years, reports In-Stat. By 2009, the worldwide wireless market will grow to more than 2.3 billion subscribers. There will be no relief from the ongoing battles for airlink supremacy over the next several years. "GSM's steady growth through 2007 will turn negative as operators move subscribers to third-generation (3G) WCDMA," says David Chamberlain, In-Stat Senior Analyst. "While the second-generation GSM system (including GPRS & EDGE) will remain the dominant airlink throughout the forecast period, CDMA airlink standards (CDMA & WCDMA) will soon encroach on GSM's numbers. By 2009, WCDMA networks will be providing service for over 40 percent of the world's CDMA users." However, those inroads are much less dramatic when classifying WCDMA as an evolution of the GSM system. The total number of new subscribers in 2004-2009 is expected to be 777.7 million worldwide.
Enterprise AI budgets are flowing in two directions at once, and only one of them builds an asset the buyer actually controls. Gartner's latest forecast puts worldwide AI spending at $2.7 trillion in 2026, but the composition of that figure matters far more than the total. Executives who read only the headline will miss the tension between what they are buying and what they actually own. The Number Behind the Number Gartner projects 2026 AI spending is a 49.5 percent increase over 2025, with $3.6 trillion forecast for 2027. AI infrastructure accounts for $1.5 trillion of this year's total, more than half. Gartner's John-David Lovelock calls the data center buildout the largest infrastructure project humanity has undertaken, and describes demand as inelastic even as memory prices climb. Compute Concentration is a Sovereignty Issue Gartner expects hyperscalers and service providers buying AI-optimized servers to remain the largest single area of spending. For an enterprise, t...