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Race to AGI Daily Digest - Saturday, January 10, 2026
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TLDR
OpenAI and SoftBank are committing $1B to SB Energy‑backed AI data centers, escalating the global compute land grab.
Chip and tooling names like Intel, ASML, and Broadcom rally as investors bet on a long runway for AI infrastructure spend.
Novo Nordisk’s agentic AI CRM shows pharma adopting AI inside regulated sales workflows, extending AI into safety‑critical domains.
Havas’s AVA portal and OpenAI’s Convogo deal show AI governance and leadership tooling becoming a strategic layer on top of base models.
Grok’s global probes keep generative abuse under the spotlight, driving enterprises toward more controlled, multi‑model setups.
The Full Story
Following Monday’s backlash against $98B of US data centers, today’s headline is almost defiant: OpenAI and SoftBank are putting $1B into SB Energy‑powered AI data centers OpenAI–SoftBank deal ->. So instead of slowing down, the infrastructure race is going global and getting welded directly to energy assets OpenAI profile -> SoftBank Group ->.
Markets are reading that signal loud and clear. Intel jumps double digits, with ASML and Broadcom also up, as investors rotate back into the pipes and fabs that turn cheap watts into tokens Intel overview -> ASML profile -> Broadcom profile ->. After a week of NVIDIA news and chip‑export drama, the message is simple: whoever controls compute capacity, wins.
Meanwhile, AI keeps seeping into safety‑critical and tightly regulated work. Novo Nordisk is baking agentic AI into Veeva’s CRM for its global sales force, which sits right at the edge of healthcare and compliance Novo Nordisk agentic CRM ->. That builds on Friday’s air‑taxi stack and earlier hospital moves: agents aren’t just chatting, they’re nudging real‑world decisions in medicine and pharma.
Because of that, governance is suddenly a product category. Havas launched its AVA LLM portal to standardize AI use across the agency, routing work through OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google with central controls Havas AVA portal -> Anthropic profile -> Google profile ->. In parallel, OpenAI quietly picked up Convogo’s team to beef up its own cloud leadership and control tools Convogo acquisition -> Convogo profile ->.
All of that sits in the shadow of Grok, which is now facing “global probes” over sexualized images Grok probe recap -> xAI company page ->. As we’ve seen all week, xAI’s troubles are pushing everyone else to prove they can scale assistants into factories, hospitals, and sales teams without blowing through social and legal guardrails.
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