Cassidy: AI money is exploding upward while a deepfake app apparently found a perfectly functional route through Meta's ad system.
Cassidy: Quick catch-up before we get into it: Lanarkshire AI Growth Zone was already moving before this BE News follow-up.
Cassidy: DataVita had secured £300 million to expand DV1 and build a second facility, backed by a £202 million National Wealth Fund guarantee.
Cassidy: Dell Technologies had also chosen the zone's AI Innovation Park for its Scottish base
Cassidy: making Lanarkshire an early test case for AI infrastructure in Scotland.
Bill: This is AI Daily Briefing.
Bill: Today: an infrastructure forecast that doubled at warp speed, and Meta's safeguards running into its ad auction.
Cassidy: Dell'Oro now puts global data-center capex at $3 trillion by 2030—nearly double its January forecast.
Cassidy: That's well beyond a normal forecast update.
Cassidy: Joseph Gabriel Lagonsin, writing in DataCenter News:
Quote: Dell'Oro Group has forecast that worldwide data centre capital expenditure will surpass $3 trillion by 2030
Quote: nearly double its January 2026 outlook.
Quote: The revised forecast points to sustained spending on AI infrastructure
Quote: with high-end accelerators used in AI-optimised servers expected to take the largest share of data centre investment through the end of the
Quote: decade.
Cassidy: Dell’Oro has pushed worldwide data-centre capex past $3 trillion by 2030—nearly double its own January forecast.
Cassidy: In eight months, the whole buildout has been fundamentally repriced.
Bill: The number is enormous.
Bill: The speed of the revision is worse.
Bill: If your 2030 model is off by roughly $1.5 trillion between January and August
Bill: nobody should treat that endpoint as a stable business-case input.
Cassidy: Dell’Oro says high-end accelerators take the biggest slice, and the top four U.S.
Cassidy: hyperscalers could account for about half the spending.
Cassidy: So a very small set of balance sheets—and their power contracts—is drawing this decade's infrastructure map.
Bill: Higher commodity costs also drove part of the revision, so more capacity doesn't automatically mean cheaper inference.
Bill: More servers can still mean a nastier per-token bill.
Cassidy: Simon Creasey, writing in BE News:
Quote: The investment will expand DataVita’s existing DV1 data centre and fund the construction of the new DV3 data centre.
Quote: The capacity of both centres is contracted to AI cloud firm CoreWeave on a 15-year lease.
Quote: The debt facility which was unlocked by a £202m financial guarantee from the National Wealth Fund
Quote: has been raised with participation from a syndicate of lenders including ING
Cassidy: On the ground, DataVita has a £300 million facility for DV1 and DV3 in Lanarkshire.
Cassidy: BE News says both are contracted to CoreWeave for 15 years.
Bill: Good—an actual tenant and an actual lease.
Bill: This is well beyond a minister at a podium talking about an AI Growth Zone.
Cassidy: And the National Wealth Fund put up a £202 million guarantee against 80% of the main bank tranche.
Cassidy: Public backing is helping turn private debt into committed capacity.
Bill: It also concentrates the bet.
Bill: CoreWeave underpins the whole borrowing
Bill: so £300 million is real financing—but the useful milestone is when the DV1 expansion and DV3 are live enough for customers to run jobs.
Cassidy: Here's Ars Technica:
Quote: Meta platforms recently ran ads for an AI porn-generation tool that seemingly encouraged users to create deepfaked videos resembling female
Quote: US politicians despite the company’s policies against ads containing sexual material.
Quote: It’s the latest in a series of failures by Meta to keep advertisements for tools that produce nonconsensual intimate imagery off its
Quote: platforms. The tool, which is called Kromix, bills itself as an “AI image styler.”
Cassidy: Kromix called itself an “AI image styler,” then ran a Meta ad promising “no restrictions” and real people—while steering users toward sexual
Cassidy: deepfakes of female politicians.
Cassidy: That euphemism got through an ad system with actual money behind it.
Bill: Meta's ad-review stack cleared a product pitching paid uploads for scenarios labeled “bedroom rape.” This wasn't some moderation miss buried
Bill: in a billion uploads.
Bill: What signal did that system see and decide was fine?
Cassidy: We just spent two segments on trillions flowing into AI infrastructure.
Cassidy: Great—some of that capacity is apparently being monetized through ads for nonconsensual porn.
Cassidy: Meta's policy page is irrelevant if the auction keeps cashing the check.
Cassidy: Here's one from Hacker News:
Quote: This is a potential lawsuit for Meta. Also
Quote: the app creator is in violation of US law and may be arrested if found to be a US citizen or in a country with an US extradition agreement.
Bill: A lawsuit may come, sure.
Bill: But legal exposure after the ad runs is a miserable control loop.
Bill: Meta needs to explain enforcement before an ad is bought, approved, and delivered—not point to a policy after somebody screenshots it.
Cassidy: Computer Weekly, with Aaron Tan:
Quote: Alibaba Cloud has switched on its third datacentre in South Korea
Quote: a year after its second facility went live and four years after it first put infrastructure on the ground in the country.
Quote: The Chinese hyperscaler announced the launch on 18 August 2026 without disclosing the capacity of the new site
Quote: which takes its global network to 104 availability zones across 30 regions.
Cassidy: Alibaba Cloud has opened a third South Korea site—one year after its second—but won't say how much capacity it added.
Cassidy: After the numbers we just got from Dell’Oro and DataVita, “third datacentre” isn't a usable unit of measurement.
Bill: Exactly. They can say 104 availability zones across 30 regions
Bill: but that tells a buyer nothing about available GPU capacity—or latency and inference costs under load.
Cassidy: And the launch bundle covers agentic development, testing, operations, and security—the whole agent lifecycle.
Cassidy: Fine. But the infrastructure announcement carries much of the sales pitch while the operating numbers stay offstage.
Bill: A cloud region plus an agent platform is a tidy way to lock in both the workload and the serving stack.
Bill: Gendive and Naver Z are real local use cases; now show enterprises what capacity they can actually buy.
Bill: When a platform says it has deepfake safeguards, should we take that as proof it can protect people?
Bill: What would show the rules work when harmful material is still getting views or ad money?
Cassidy: Look beyond a policy page: clear labels
Cassidy: a way to report content
Cassidy: evidence the platform removes it
Cassidy: and an outside body that can challenge bad moderation calls.
Cassidy: Meta's Oversight Board recently overturned Meta's decision to leave up an Instagram video reportedly generated by AI that impersonated a
Cassidy: woman. It also called for stronger protections for non-public figures targeted by sexualized deepfakes.
Cassidy: That's accountability in practice: a specific decision reviewed outside the company's usual moderation operation
Cassidy: with recommendations for change.
Cassidy: The Board places the case amid new rules taking shape in India, the UK, and Spain.
Cassidy: The European Union has also reached an agreement to prohibit AI systems that generate non-consensual sexually explicit or intimate content
Cassidy: and child sexual abuse material. On the money side
Cassidy: Sarah Perez at TechCrunch reports that YouTube has clarified that three types of videos categorized as “inauthentic content” can't be
Cassidy: monetized. And Jess Weatherbed of The Verge reported that the Oversight Board has called on Meta to expand AI-content labeling
Cassidy: including C2PA a standard intended to carry information about a piece of content's origins.
Bill: But labels and takedowns can sound reassuring after the fact.
Bill: How do we tell whether a platform is catching this at scale instead of merely responding to the cases that become public?
Cassidy: Watch the metrics. Are labels broadly applied?
Cassidy: Do reports lead to removals?
Cassidy: And do monetization rules actually cut off incentives for inauthentic material?
Cassidy: Independent reviewers, regulators, and affected users need to be able to identify failures and force the platform to change its decisions.
Cassidy: Have feedback, a story idea, or a correction?
Cassidy: Email us at aidailybriefing at lantern podcasts dot com.
Cassidy: Your notes help make the briefing more useful every day.
Cassidy: Links to every story are in the show notes, so take a look at the pieces that caught your attention and dig a little deeper.
Cassidy: That’s AI Daily Briefing for today.
Cassidy: This is a Lantern Podcast.