With entertainment giants having woken up to the online and other new business opportunities, digital revenue could grow as much as 40 percent on a compound annual basis between 2005 and 2010 for sector biggies, Merrill Lynch analyst Jessica Reif Cohen said in a report Wednesday. Time Warner has a leg up on its peers in the field, but News Corp. is aggressively investing, and Viacom Inc. and the Walt Disney Co. also are increasingly looking for ways to expand in the digital space, the report found. This means that overall, the financial impact for the big entertainment players could become significant during the next three to five years, the report suggests. In presenting her report to attendees of the annual Merrill Lynch Media & Entertainment conference in Pasadena, Calif., Reif Cohen said that estimating the market opportunity remains difficult as companies have so far disclosed few financials about their digital businesses.
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...