Welcome to the seventeenth edition of The AI Native Engineer by Zencoder, this newsletter will take approximately 5 mins to read.
If you only have one minute, here are the 5 most important things:
The third week of February 2026 has marked a definitive shift in the global AI race. At the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, the dialogue moved away from the "Silicon Valley vs. The World" narrative toward a new concept: Sovereign Compute.
Gartner recently forecast that AI spending will skyrocket to $2.5 trillion by the end of 2026. What’s startling isn't the number, but where the money is going: $1.37 trillion is being funneled directly into AI Infrastructure (Data Centers and Hardware).
Countries are no longer content with renting compute from a few US-based cloud giants. From India's $15B AI Hub in Vizag to the Adani Group's 100GW AI factory, nations are racing to own the physical silicon and the data that trains it. As one summit leader put it: "If you supply the data but not the models, you risk becoming a market rather than a maker."
While the world focuses on text and video, Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs just secured $1 billion to solve the next frontier: Spatial Intelligence. Current LLMs are "screen-bound" they understand the world through pixels and tokens. Spatial AI aims to give agents a "World Model" that understands physics, depth, and 3D interaction. For the AI-native engineer, this is the bridge to Physical AI where agents can finally move from managing your code to managing robots in the real world.
75 nations signed the Delhi Declaration, a voluntary framework for inclusive AI. More importantly, India formally joined Pax Silica the US-led effort on AI supply chain security. We are seeing the formation of a "Silicon Bloc" where economic security is now inextricably linked to reliable AI infrastructure.
The capital floodgates have opened for spatial reasoning and sovereign data infrastructure.
| Company | Feb 2026 Raise | New Valuation | Key Takeaway |
| World Labs | $1B | $5B+ | Founded by Fei-Fei Li; investors include Nvidia, Fidelity, and AMD. Focusing on 3D spatial intelligence. |
| Adani Group | $100B (Commit) | - | Directed investment into a 5GW green-powered AI data center platform in India. |
| Vestwell | $385M | $2B | Fintech-heavy Series E; using AI to scale savings and wealth management tools. |
| Temporal | $300M | $3.5B+ | The workflow reliability leader is now a critical backbone for "Agentic Fault Tolerance." |
| Code Metal | $125M | - | Series B led by Salesforce Ventures; focusing on verifiable code translation and AI-native refactoring. |
Before we had Spatial AI or Qwen-3.5, we had a single program running on a Ferranti Mark I in Manchester.
In 1951, Christopher Strachey wrote the first successful AI program. It wasn't a chatbot or a world model; it was a program that played checkers (draughts). By the summer of 1952, it could play a complete game at a reasonable speed. Around the same time, Anthony Oettinger created "Shopper," a simulated world where an AI "shopper" would visit eight shops at random to find an item.
Both programs used Rote Learning the simplest form of machine learning where the machine simply memorizes its previous successes to act faster next time. 75 years later, our "spatial agents" are doing exactly what Strachey and Oettinger envisioned: navigating a "mall" of 3D data, memorizing patterns, and learning how to reach a goal more efficiently.
Reflection: Strachey’s checkers program was the first "Digital Colleague." As we move to agents that can manage entire data centers, are we just playing a much bigger game of checkers?
Featuring Amos Bar-Joseph, who is building an AI-first company with just 3 employees, on a mission to scale to $30M ARR by leveraging autonomous agents instead of traditional teams.
AI is rapidly moving beyond copilots and automation tools into something far more powerful autonomous agents capable of planning, executing, and optimizing entire business functions.
In this session, we’ll explore a provocative but increasingly real question:
Will AI agents become the next CEOs?
Join Amos Bar-Joseph and the Zencoder team as we unpack:
What separates true autonomous AI companies from simple automation stacks
How AI agents are already running growth, operations, and engineering workflows
The shift from human-managed processes to orchestrated agent systems
What founders and product leaders must build today to stay ahead of this transition
Whether you’re building a startup, scaling a SaaS business, or designing AI-first products, this webinar will give you a front-row view into the rise of the autonomous company and the infrastructure powering it.
February 25, 2026 - RSVP here
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