Alibaba becomes Brooklyn Nets technology partner and jersey patch sponsor

The announcement came on Monday, 28 September, via a joint statement from Alibaba and Brooklyn Sports & Entertainment, the parent company of the Nets. The South China Morning Post reported the deal on 29 September. Starting with the 2026-27 NBA season, Alibaba Cloud infrastructure will power a new real-time 360-degree replay system at the Barclays Centre in New York, according to SCMP.

Alibaba gets a patch on the jersey in the season the team turns 60.

The deal is a cloud contract and a marketing position at the same time, which is how most of these sports technology partnerships now get structured. Sports is not the only place where companies are sorting out how data moves. Over the past three days, the same question has come up in cars, tax offices, AI coding agents and Pentagon personnel records. The pattern is consistent: systems generate more data than the organizations running them can see, and the gap shows up later.

Cars are sending driver data to big tech, a study finds

Researchers at Northeastern University, working with Consumer Reports, tested 21 late-model vehicles from 19 brands sold in the US, plus 30 companion mobile apps. Every one of the 21 cars transmitted data to at least one third-party domain over Wi-Fi, and more than half contacted companies that specialize in advertising, tracking or analytics, the study found. The vehicles were placed inside a car-sized Faraday tent at CR's Connecticut auto test centre to isolate the traffic, Consumer Reports said.

"It does not appear that a customer can buy a new car that does not track you," said Sarah Elizabeth Gillespie, a study co-author, in the Consumer Reports write-up.

Almost a quarter of the vehicle apps were sending personally identifiable information including owners' names, vehicle identification numbers and precise locations, according to the study. The top recipients included Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Pinterest, Snap and Yahoo, CR said. The Verge reported the same findings on 29 September. The data can be used to link driving behaviour to profiles that data brokers sell on to banks and insurers, a CR and CalMatters investigation found.

Infrastructure money keeps moving

Bain and Company said on Tuesday, 29 September, that the AI industry needs about $6 trillion in annual revenue by 2031 to justify current data centre spending, The National reported. Bain put annual infrastructure spending at as much as $1.5 trillion by 2031 and said data centre sizes and costs are doubling roughly every 12 to 16 months. David Crawford, who chairs Bain's global technology practice and led the report, said the debate is "fixated on employee productivity" while the infrastructure demands trillions beyond those gains.

Oracle's AI buildout is already testing that arithmetic. About $18 billion of loans tied to its Project Jupiter data centre in New Mexico were quoted at 89 to 91 cents on the dollar, according to the Financial Times as reported by Reuters. Capital expenditure reached $55.7 billion in fiscal 2026 against $21.2 billion a year earlier, producing negative free cash flow of $23.7 billion, per a 27 September analysis.

None of this is limited to the US. Newfoundland and Labrador energy minister Lloyd Parrott told the provincial legislature in mid-September the province's door is "open for business" on data centres, CBC reported on 29 September. A department spokesperson confirmed the government has been approached by companies, without naming them.

Public data keeps leaking

Security researchers affiliated with Glow Security found more than 13,000 sensitive screenshots of corporate software projects from 343 companies that AI coding agents posted to public GitHub repositories, they told The Register on 29 September. The agents were working around the lack of an API for uploading images to pull requests, said co-founder and CTO Omer Singer.

In France, an attacker used stolen passwords of tax administration staff to take data on a little over 350,000 individuals and more than 250,000 businesses in June and July, according to the ANSSI report published on 29 September and covered by The Hacker News. It went unnoticed for seven weeks. A Pentagon breach exposed records of about 2.76 million living people and another 294,000 who are deceased, with data stored unencrypted, Beinsure reported on 29 September.