Forbes Daily Briefing

The race to make India a data center hub geared up this year as the country’s two richest men made multibillion-dollar pledges to support a nationwide buildout. Gautam Adani announced in February that his infrastructure conglomerate, Adani Group, would invest $100 billion by 2035 in data centers powered by renewable energy supplied by his Adani Green Energy.

Shortly thereafter, Reliance Industries’ Mukesh Ambani said he would invest $110 billion over seven years in new data center and AI initiatives. These will be overseen by Ambani’s son Akash, with the goal of making AI affordable for Indians. “India cannot afford to rent intelligence,” said the billionaire. “Therefore, we will reduce the cost of intelligence dramatically, as we did the cost of data,” he vowed, referring to his Jio mobile operator, which was launched in 2016 offering free voice calls and cheap data.

India lags in AI infrastructure and is among Asia’s most underserved markets with a data center capacity-to-population ratio of roughly 825,000 people per megawatt of installed capacity, compared with China’s 288,186 people per megawatt, according to Cushman & Wakefield. The real estate consultancy notes that even with the government’s push to increase capacity to 5.7 gigawatts by 2030 from 1.8 gigawatts as of June, India will still trail China, which it estimates will have installed capacity of 6.8 gigawatts by then.

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Joe Strada is getting his picture taken and his employees are giving him a hard time about it. Professional photos are apparently not a common occurrence around the Strada Services warehouse in Sanford, Florida. Giving the boss a hard time is. The building is long and low, mostly concrete and metal, with loading doors punched into its sides and a wide slab of pavement out front. Company vans litter the lot.

Inside, Strada is staring at a container of wire scraps, cut lengths tossed together until the pile looks like a snake pit. Strada wonders aloud whether anyone checked what they already had before buying more. Copper wire isn’t cheap.

“I don’t have a job, but I walk around and I ask a lot of questions,” Strada says. “Like, why are we doing this?”

Strada, 63, no longer runs the business day to day. A CEO does that. Strada Services installs and services electrical, air-conditioning, plumbing and security systems for homebuilders and homeowners. The company had $534 million in revenue in 2025 and has more than 4,000 employees across 13 states. Strada is executive chairman and owns 45% of the business. Forbes estimates his net worth at $800 million. While new-home construction remains well below its pandemic boom, a rebound in homebuilding would likely propel Strada into the ranks of self-made billionaires.

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Billionaire Mark Cuban has emerged as one of the most prominent critics of humanoid robots for consumer households, repeating his criticism on Monday after previously predicting both robots and their manufacturers would “fail miserably” within five to ten years—contradicting the bets placed on the technology from other billionaires like Elon Musk.

In an appearance on tech livestream show TBPN in March, Cuban first predicted a 5-10 year lifespan for both humanoid robots and their manufacturers, adding household robots would take more optimal shapes designed for their specific tasks.

Cuban doubled down on that prediction on Monday in a post on X, noting that humanoid robots are large in size and difficult to make for multiple functions.

“Would you rather have a roomba or a humanoid that pushes around a vacuum cleaner or broom?” Cuban asked.

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The White House released the text of an “accord” reached between billionaire AI titans who met with President Donald Trump on Tuesday, an agreement the president labeled “morally binding” even as he stopped short of saying the government would support new guardrails.

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For 158 years the Martinelli family has turned apples grown in Northern California orchards into a golden juice, and it's grown into a sweet family business. 

The company had an estimated $175 million in 2025 revenue and has been increasing at 5% annually for the past five years. The business’s iconic champagne-style bottles of sparkling apple cider are today the top-seller in America and its apple-shaped juice jars are the second most sold apple juice in the country, after Mott’s. Martinelli’s products are now sold at 25,000 locations of every major retailer in America and in 38 countries.

“Even though we're not a giant company, we know and have great relationships with every single retailer out there, given how important that hero product of sparkling cider is,” says Martinelli’s 56-year-old CEO Gun Ruder. “It gives us a power with these retailers that's disproportionate to ourselves.”

Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/chloesorvino/2026/09/18/how-martinellis-turned-the-champagne-of-apple-cider-into-a-500-million-family-business/

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Both humanities’ decline and possible revival can, no surprise, be traced to concerns about career and financial security. For a time, STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) majors had the golden ticket. Now some engineering specialties (including computer engineering) have seen a sharp decline in entry-level jobs, as artificial intelligence reduces the demand for junior workers in their fields.

At the same time, those graduating with English and some other humanities degrees are finding that their versatile skills make it easier to get hired, even if they do still earn less than the engineers. The emerging conventional wisdom: In the age of AI, human skills such as creativity, communication and collaboration could provide a crucial professional edge, whatever the field.

“We really believe that the humanities equal jobs,” says Matthew Mars, head of the University of Arizona’s 8-year-old Public and Applied Humanities program, which as of last spring had more than 400 majors. Students like Crider combine an applied humanities core with courses ranging from business and entrepreneurship to fashion studies and, most recently, astrobiology. They also complete a three-course career sequence with internship preparation, an internship and a course to help them explain what they’ve learned to prospective employers.

Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/lisachambers/2026/09/21/move-over-stem-humanities-degrees-are-poised-for-a-comeback-thanks-to-ai/

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President Donald Trump unveiled a new government website powered by artificial intelligence ahead of his meeting with top AI executives—as he has contested slowing AI development amid dire warnings of the dangers it poses.

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Nvidia on Monday launched a new security system that it claims can prevent AI agents breaching their testing environments and gain unauthorized access to outside systems, just weeks after the AI chipmaker’s billionaire CEO Jensen Huang downplayed alarm about recent safety breaches and pushed back on the need for an AI slowdown.

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Peptides are a large category of amino acid-based drugs that include legal ones, like GLP-1 weight-loss medications and insulin. More and more people are experimenting with loosely regulated peptides like secretagogues, which have become a hit among workout enthusiasts looking for an edge to train harder and look better. But there’s little scientific data on their safety or efficacy, and the FDA has not approved them for weight loss or workout recovery.

These drugs are now readily available on the internet from sketchy sellers who hawk them with little oversight. In this shadowy online bazaar, which could be worth as much as $4 billion, peddlers exploit a loophole in the law under which peptides can be sold for “research purposes.”

Purchasing online peptides is a dice roll. Fitness enthusiasts who buy gray-market drugs online don't know what they're getting. The pharmaceutical ingredients in them are research-grade, meaning they're not permitted in human drugs. There’s no guarantee that what people are buying is what it claims to be, or whether they’re injecting themselves with concoctions laced with unknown and possibly dangerous ingredients. Making sense of their safety is even more complex for the peptide fans who take them “stacked,” using multiple gray-market drugs at the same time in the belief this will increase their benefits.

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Billionaire Bill Gates told “Meet the Press” that government regulation is needed for artificial intelligence and warned the technology is “powerful” enough to “cause a billion deaths” if used maliciously, as Washington and the AI industry consider how to move forward in light of dire warnings about AI’s potential effects.

NBC News released a clip Friday of Gates’ interview with “Meet the Press,” in which the billionaire and philanthropist was asked about warnings from AI workers that the technology could potentially wipe out humanity.

“AI is certainly powerful enough to drive events that … cause a billion deaths,” Gates said, noting “there’s never been a weapon as powerful as the combination of people with ill intent using the latest AI tools.”

Gates was also asked about Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s recent essay calling for a slowdown on AI, which argued frontier labs should slow down the pace of their progress and “voluntarily work together to set standards” around artificial intelligence.

Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2026/09/25/bill-gates-warns-ai-is-powerful-enough-to-cause-a-billion-deaths/

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