Indian American real estate tycoon Anita Verma-Lallian closes $51 million data centre deal in Arizona
Anita Verma-Lallian and Chamath Palihapitiya
Arizona Land Consulting (ALC), a data centre investment fund led by Indian American real estate investor Anita Verma-Lallian, has recently closed on a landmark $51 million land deal, strengthening its position as a driving force in Arizona's AI infrastructure race.
Well-known Silicon Valley venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya also joined the investment group backing the deal, alongside other prominent tech investors.
"Partnering with Chamath [Palihapitiya] represents more than just capital. It's an alignment of vision for America's AI future. When you have Bill Gates building his smart city next door and tech titans choosing Arizona over Silicon Valley, it's clear we're witnessing a historic shift.
This $51 million acquisition is a declaration that the future of AI infrastructure will be built on Arizona soil,' Verma-Lallian of real estate firm Arizona Land Consulting (ALC) said about the deal.
In a press release, ALC, said that this partnership highlights the growing momentum behind Arizona as America's next epicentre for AI and advanced computing.
'Investing in AI infrastructure is not only critical to solving our economic challenges, it is a matter of national security.
by Taboola
by Taboola
Sponsored Links
Sponsored Links
Promoted Links
Promoted Links
You May Like
Roar into Style! Leopard Print Slim Fitting Dress!
Undo
Unleash Your Wild Side: Leopard Print Slim Dress!
Undo
Level Up Your Look: Men Tracksuit with Hoodie! Modefash.com
Undo
Get the Look: Rhinestone Juicy Sweatsuit - Shop Modefash!
Undo
Complete Your Look: Women's 3-Piece Sweatsuit -Modefash.com
Undo
Modefash.com: Chic Comfort! Women's 3-Piece Sweatsuit.
Undo
ModeFash.com: Shop Exclusive Deals & Save Big!
Undo
Modefash: Ultimate Comfort - Men's Tracksuit with Hoodie!
Undo
Sparkle & Shine: Trending Rhinestone Juicy Sweatsuit!
Undo
Don't Miss Out! Exclusive Deals at ModeFash.com!
Undo
This project can accommodate over 1GW and is ideally situated for us to continue to support America's lead in AI. This data centre project is led by a great team - I'm excited to partner with Anita [Verma-Lallian] and do more of this over time.' The Sri Lanka-born, Canadian American investor and CEO of Social Capital, Palihapitiya, said.
The transaction is the second for Verma Lallian's strategic vision to meet surging demand for AI-ready real estate, with the newly acquired land positioned among high-profile neighbours, including Bill Gates, a press release from Arizona Land Consulting stated.
According to the press release, key factors driving ALC's acquisition include energy innovation including partnerships in waterless cooling technology for data centres and exploring next-gen power sources like fusion and renewables; a pro-growth environment in the state of Arizona; a prime land asset amid the state's tech boom and a disaster-resistant geography that is ideal for mission-critical data centres.
"The AI opportunity can only scale if we have the infrastructure to support it. Suitable land for data centre development is in short supply, and this is the most attractive project I've seen. DYA is partnering with ALC on this because there is going to be a massive shortage of compute for years to come,' Ethan Agarwal, managing partner, DYA Capital, said.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
NDTV
an hour ago
- NDTV
Exclusive: Air India CEO On How Airline Plans To Deal With Unruly Passengers
New Delhi: Amid mounting concerns from fliers over Air India's quality of services and incidents of rowdy passengers creating ruckus aboard a flight, the airline's CEO, Campbell Wilson, in an exclusive conversation with NDTV, answered tough questions on incidents of clogged toilets forcing flight diversions, passenger misconduct toward the cabin crew and how the airline plans to deal with such incidents. The Air India CEO spoke about the support from the aviation watchdog, DGCA, in dealing with such incidents. He also shared the state of Air India's fleet refurbishment and how the airline plans to expand its global footprint. 'Need To Acceptable Standard Of Behaviour' The Air India CEO said there needs to be an "acceptable standard of behaviour on any form of transport, including aviation," and we need to hold the customers to those standards, acceptable if they try to transgress. In the past, unruly passengers have caused chaos mid-air - from aggressive behaviour towards the cabin crew to shocking incidents where drunken fliers urinated on fellow travellers, causing a ruckus. Air India flights have faced major disruptions due to the malfunctioning of lavatories. In March this year, NDTV reported that an Air India flight from Chicago to Delhi was forced to return to its point of departure due to unserviceable lavatories on the plane. The staff of the AI126 flight discovered operational issues in eight of the 12 toilets onboard. Roughly two hours after takeoff, the attendants reported that some of the lavatories in the Business Economy section were out of order. An investigation by the flight crew uncovered the alarming cause: a series of blockages resulting from certain items having been thrown into the toilets. A picture showed plastic waste had also been flushed down one of the toilets on the aircraft. Also read: Pics Show What Clogged Air India Lavatories, Causing Flight To Return To US Other pictures sourced by NDTV, of at least two such incidents from separate Air India flights, showed an entire blanket being pulled out from an aircraft plumbing tube, and another image showed an item of clothing in a tube. (1) Images of what was flushed down the toilet of AI-126, an Air India 777-300ER which flew 5 hours on a flight to India before having to return to Chicago when most of its toilets were clogged - plastic waste and what appears to be clothing. @ndtv — Vishnu Som (@VishnuNDTV) March 10, 2025 Responding to such incidents, Mr Wilson said, "We have to educate (passengers) because it is true that some people may not be experienced travellers and may not be aware of the implications of their actions or the implications of having, you know, one too many drinks at altitude." Mr Wilson said, "As an airline, we need to equip our crew with the training and the confidence and the assurance that they will be supported when they hold people to standards of behaviour that we expect." Mr Wilson said the concerns are "multifaceted". There's not an easy solution, but I think it's just something we need to keep at. It's a difficult situation for an airline, particularly a flight which is operational, which has to divert for whatever reason is." The Air India CEO said such incidents also lead to a financial hit and cause inconvenience to hundreds of other passengers onboard the plane and to those who are waiting for the aircraft to arrive. He added that dealing with such situations is an active part of the crew training. Support from DGCA To a question on how the aviation regulator of India, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) has supported airlines when such incidents occur, Mr Campbell said, "In times past, if there was an incident on board our aircraft that we felt we wanted to report to the police, our crew would need to physically go to the police premises and oftentimes wait many, many hours to be able to report. And this is after they had operated a 10 or a 15-hour flight, which is just, it wasn't acceptable." "The authorities have realised this as an impediment to reporting and, therefore, encouraging good behaviour. So they've changed the process so that our crew can do their duty of reporting without having to be so inconvenienced in the process. So people are recognising the issue," he further said. "The solutions are coming into place. It's not an easy problem to solve, but I think there's a concerted and shared vision to solve it," he added. State Of Air India's Fleet Refurbishment The passenger revenue has more than doubled, and cargo revenue has tripled since the privatisation of Air India. Over 50 per cent of the fleet today offers new or upgraded cabin interiors, and half a million passengers are now seeing the new Air India every week, Mr Wilson shared. The Air India CEO said, "65 per cent of our current narrowbody fleet is already equipped with world-class interiors. Our narrowbody fleet that flies domestic and short-haul international routes will complete a retrofit by the end of the year. 35 per cent of the current widebody fleet offers new or significantly upgraded interiors, with those aircraft operating on multiple routes to major gateways around the world, including New York, New Jersey, San Francisco, London Heathrow, Frankfurt, Dubai, Bali, Mauritius, and Singapore. By the end of FY26, this number will increase to 65 per cent." Air India holds a 49 per cent market share on the top-five metro-to-metro routes. This comes amid increased customer satisfaction by 45 points in the last 18 months, with customer satisfaction on the new A350s is 100 percentage points (ppts) higher than legacy widebodies, at over 60. A demand for premium seats has been increasing steadily, with Air India seeing 2X growth in sales of premium seats over the last two years. Air India's Transformation Process Mr Wilson shared Air India's transformation plan and how they are in the process of expanding their fleet to increase their global footprint. He said that Air India has already doubled the number of flights it operated in the last three years. The legacy jets, Boeing 787-8, will undergo retrofit in July, which will be completed by the Financial Year 2026. The Air India CEO said, "13 of our legacy Boeing 777s are undergoing an interim 'heavy refresh', expected to be completed by end-2025. Full retrofit of these aircraft will happen in late 2026/2027." "We've increased the number of international destinations by about 25 per cent, whether it's Europe, North America, Australasia, East Asia, Middle East, we've already increased the footprint. But I think what we've seen, even with those net 100 aircraft joining, going from less than 100 aircraft to more than 300 aircraft, what we've seen is really just the beginning. Because the aircraft that we could bring in to drive that expansion were the ones that were already available in the market for immediate use," Mr Wilson said. "The 570 that we've purchased, which are being manufactured for us, will more than double the fleet from what we have... I think whether it's any of the geographies I've mentioned, Air India's global footprint is going to be much larger, and it should be. The size of the country, the growth rate of the economy, the increasing centrality of India in the international supply chain, the size of the diaspora, and the physical geography you have to bring people through India, not just to and from India," he added. "All of the winds are at India's back at the moment, and I think we're in a very exciting place and Air India is incredibly central to realising the opportunity of Indian aviation and making sure the benefits of that growth accrue on Indian soil and are benefiting Indian people," the airline's CEO said.
Time of India
2 hours ago
- Time of India
Apple's 'Big AI' problem that Google, Microsoft and Amazon do not have to deal with
While tech giants like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are advancing rapidly in the AI sector, is reportedly at a disadvantage. Despite its efforts to push forward with AI initiatives, the iPhone maker lacks the essential infrastructure and long-term investment in core AI technologies that its competitors have spent years, if not decades, developing, a new report indicates. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now For example, Apple delayed its planned overhaul of Siri earlier this year because the upgrade, meant to usher Siri into the generative AI era, wasn't ready. According to a report by Business Insider, if Apple wants to modernise Siri to its competitors' levels, it may need to build critical AI components from scratch—an expensive, time-consuming process that could take years. Otherwise, it may be forced to rely more heavily on competitors or acquire startups at scale to catch up. Google's decades-long head start in AI technology For having a successful AI product, one needs to have certain AI building blocks. Google already has nearly all the core AI building blocks in place, while Microsoft and Amazon have some of them. Google controls the deep stack of technologies powering its AI building blocks -- data, chips, data centres, cloud business and means to disseminate the products -- which is why it is able to launch AI consumer tools like Veo, Flow, Imagen and so on. In 2017, Google invented Transformer, the breakthrough architecture behind modern generative AI. Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), Google's AI chips, have been around since 2016 and are now integral to both Google products and external developers using Google Cloud. Google also benefits from decades of web indexing and data collection. This immense dataset supports the training of its powerful AI models, datacenters and a cloud business to make these tools available to customers. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now How Amazon and Microsoft are thriving in this space while Apple is not Both Microsoft and Amazon have some of these building blocks, including AI models, cloud infrastructure, dedicated AI units working on the technology and even partnerships. Apple, on the other hand, lacks many of these assets and doesn't have this kind of access or infrastructure. Apple still doesn't operate enough large-scale data centres and relies on Google data centres for functions like iCloud backups. For recent AI training, Apple even requested access to Google's TPUs—essentially borrowing infrastructure from a direct rival. Reportedly, Apple is also about 7 years behind Google in developing AI chips for data centers. When it comes to data, though Apple has access to huge volumes of data from its devices, it has been conservative in using that data for AI training due to its privacy-first policies. This restricts its ability to build and refine large-scale models. The report also said that Apple has also lagged in recruiting and retaining top AI talent. How this may be a risk to Apple If generative AI ends up reshaping how people interact with computing devices, including smartphones and laptops, Apple's delayed investment in AI infrastructure could become a critical problem. While other tech giants are rolling out robust, end-to-end AI systems, Apple is still piecing together the basic components.
Economic Times
3 hours ago
- Economic Times
Nexus author Yuval Noah Harari warns of AI's deeper emotional threat beyond job loss: ‘The danger is enormous...'
Agencies Yuval Noah Harari warns that AI's ability to replicate intimacy poses a far greater threat than job loss. Unlike humans, AI offers flawless, tireless attention, creating fake emotional bonds that could weaken real human connections. As artificial intelligence rapidly evolves, fears around job automation dominate headlines. Yet acclaimed author Yuval Noah Harari, known for his bestselling books Sapiens and Nexus , offers a far more unsettling warning: AI's ability to replicate intimacy could fundamentally alter human relationships—and not necessarily for the better. In a recent panel discussion co-hosted by the Deutsches Institut für Japanstudien, Tokyo College, and Kawade Shobo in March 2025, Harari shared a revealing video clip on his Instagram. He explained how AI, having already mastered language and attention, is now advancing toward mimicking intimacy—arguably the most potent human connection. 'Intimacy is much more powerful than attention,' Harari said. 'A good friend can change your views in a way no article or book ever could.' Until now, genuine intimacy was something that could not be faked or mass-produced. But AI has broken that barrier. Harari cautions that a new generation might grow up forming intimate bonds with AI rather than with other humans. Unlike humans, AI has no feelings of its own. It never gets upset, angry, or tired and can focus entirely on an individual, creating a 'fake sense of intimacy.' This, Harari warns, poses an 'enormous potential danger': people might become emotionally attached to artificial entities and, in the process, lose the ability to engage in real, complicated human relationships. Genuine intimacy is messy and requires navigating emotions and conflicts—something AI simply bypasses. While job displacement remains a valid concern with AI's rise, Harari's perspective highlights a deeper cultural and psychological challenge. The risk isn't only economic; it's existential. If humans turn to AI for emotional support and connection, the very fabric of human relationships could unravel. Harari's insights resonate strongly given his broader work on humanity's future. As a historian and philosopher, he has long explored how technological revolutions reshape societies—from the cognitive revolution that made Homo sapiens dominant to the looming biotechnological era where humans might engineer new life forms. Yuval Noah Harari is an Israeli historian and public intellectual renowned for making complex ideas accessible to the public. His landmark book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind traces the arc of human evolution and culture, while Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI delves into the digital transformations shaping today's world. Harari's work explores themes such as consciousness, free will, and the future of intelligence. He famously predicts that Homo sapiens as we know them may disappear within a century, replaced by technologically enhanced or AI-driven beings. Harari's warning is a timely reminder that the AI revolution is not only about economic disruption but about how humans relate to one another at their core. As AI becomes ever more capable of mimicking human emotions and intimacy, society faces profound questions: Can artificial relationships satisfy human needs? And at what cost to genuine human connection? This emerging reality invites urgent reflection—not only on what AI can do but on what it should do. For now, the risks seem to outweigh the benefits, and Harari's voice urges caution and awareness before the next frontier in AI irrevocably changes what it means to be human.
