In your briefing today:

📣 The NHS in Scotland remains “financially unsustainable” despite an extra £3 billion being pumped into the service, according to report from Audit Scotland. The spending watchdog says the service’s performance has “not improved in line with commitments” despite the extra money and thousands more staff. (The Scotsman)

📣 The Scottish Government has ordered a review into grooming gangs in Scotland, after coming under pressure from victims. Professor Alexis Jay, who wrote the report into child sexual exploitation in Rotherham, will have an advisory role to the review and chair a group looking into the issue. (BBC)

📣 The energy regulator Ofgem has just announced a £28 billion investment in the energy grid, billed as the biggest spend on the network since it was first built. The biggest part of the funding - £17.8 billion - will go on the gas network, with the balance - £10.3 billion - going on the electricity network. The investment will rise to an estimated £90 billion by 2031. (Reuters) (Read Ofgem’s announcement)

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📣 Around 3,200 Covid deaths in Scotland remain under investigation by a special Crown Office unit. Set up in May 2020, Operation Koper is the largest single investigation of deaths in Scottish history, and is examining deaths in care homes. (The Scotsman has the exclusive)

📣 Keir Starmer is in Scotland today: among other events, he’ll be meeting the Norwegian prime minister in the north of Scotland to highlight ties between the two countries. (Holyrood)

📣 Banning payment for sex did not reduce the number of people advertising services, Irish police have told MSPs. The claim was made as MSPs consider Ash Regan’s bid to introduce the “Nordic model” which aims to reduce demand for prostitution by punishing the buyers of services. (Herald)

📣 A woman has lost a discrimination claim against an aerospace firm over its toilet policy for transgender staff. An employment tribunal found Leonardo did not place women at a significant disadvantage to male staff. (BBC)

📣 A former teacher who force fed, attacked and tormented 18 girls at a residential school has escaped a prison term: victims have hit out at the judge’s decision. (Daily Record)

📣 Health Secretary Wes Streeting has ordered a clinical review of the diagnosis of mental health conditions, asking experts to role on whether normal feelings have become “over pathologised”. There are now 4.4 million working-age people climaing sickness or incapacity benefit, up 1.2 million since 2019. (Guardian)

📣 Nato and the UK have hit back at Vladimir Putin’s claims that Russia was “ready for war” with Europe, with Keir Starmer dismissing “Kremlin claptrap”. (Independent)

📣 The row about those US attacks on alleged drug-running boats continues: there are now claims the Pentagon knew there were survivors after an initial attack on one, but still launched a follow-on attack to finish them off. (AP)

📣 Dozens of photographs of Jeffrey Epstein’s private island have been released, with politicians calling them “a harrowing look behind Epstein's closed doors”. (Sky News)

⚽️ “There was a warm welcome – and then the emotional goodbye,” as Michael Gannon puts events at Parkhead last night: the welcome to new boss Wilfried Nancy, who has finally signed. The farewell to interim manager Martin O’Neill, who leaves his successor with the perfect Christmas present: level with Hearts at the top of the table, a decent position in Europe and the chance of silverware within 10 days. It’s been an extraordinary turnaround by the club legend. (Daily Record)

⚽️ In England, Leeds stunned Chelsea 3-1 and Liverpool could only manage a 1-1 draw with Sunderland.

🗣️ In yesterday’s edition of The Early Line we took a look at interesting analysis by the OBR, highlighted by Times columnist Fraser Nelson, that suggested both Rachel Reeves and Donald Trump might be waiting for one thing: the AI revolution, making the UK and US economies much more efficient in the near future, and thus saving them having to make difficult spending decisions today.

That would mean we were all (even more) invested in the AI revolution. Most of us are, in some way, already: if you have a stocks and shaers ISA, or a pension, or a job in one of the industries that stands to benefit from AI, then you’re already invested. Having the state itself waiting on benefit from the bots rather doubles the stakes.

Which raises the question: is there a bubble forming around AI? There’s certainly a vast amount of money being spent on building the expensive infrastructure needed to support AI. Between now and 2030 the world’s biggest firms will invest $5 trillion on infrastructure. According to JPMorgan, that means they’ll need to see around $650 billion in revenues every year by the end of the decade, up from $50 billion today.

That’s an awful lot of ChatGPT subscriptions, or their equivalent.

So let’s take just one of the big AI pioneers as an example - OpenAI, creater of ChatGPT. Were they they only AI company in the world (they’re really not - think of Meta, Google, Microsoft, Anthropic and Amazon, to name only five), that revenue target would equate to more than 200 million of their mid-range $20-a-month plans, by Early Line’s rickety early-morning arithmetic.

OpenAI have 20 million paying subscribers today - more than Disney Plus, notes Deutsche Bank. But the bank has also warned they are struggling to recruit new subscribers in Europe, at least.

Of course, the burden - and opportunity - won’t all fall to one company. But it’s perhaps emblematic of the lofty aspirations of these startups that OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has just targeted winning 220 million paying subscribers by 2030.

That’s right - one company, OpenAI, is targeting the sort of number which JPMorgan has implied is the total AI market in 2030.

To break down OpenAI’s numbers: they say paying users will be only 8.5% of their user base by that point, which means they think 2.6 billion total people, including freeloaders, will use their chatbot every week - just shy of a third of the world’s population by then.

That’s… a lot. Especially when you consider from where they start this five-year sprint: they have 35 million paying users, and annualised revenue of around $20 billion today.

Those numbers are amazing for a young company, and that income is increasing at a lofty rate - they made more in the first six months of 2025 than they made in all of 2024.

But they also burned through $2.5 billion of funds in that six month period, due to research and development costs. And HSBC analysts recently said the company needs to find $207 billion in new funding, again by 2030, to pay for its data centre plans. It’s recently committed to $1.4 trillion in data centre deals. And none of these numbers include the electricity bill.

If your head is spinning, and well it might, now bear in mind that this is only one company. Those other tech behemoths mentioned earlier - Meta, Microsoft, Anthropic, Amazon - are also spending vast sums on their data centre plans. And their systems are pretty good - Google’s Gemini is my current favourite AI. It’s inevitable that AI’s users, and their revenue, will be split among competing engines.

The odds that this is all a bubble, then, are pretty high. Some even say they’re normal. “Tech enthusiasm always runs ahead of tech realities,” Michael Parekh, a former analyst at Goldman Sachs, told the Economist recently (£).

The potential implications of that bubble have filled pages of that newspaper in recent weeks, and wouldn’t fit in a breakfast-time email bulletin. But, in brief, the damage to stock markets and economies would be “brutal”, it says.

And it is certainly worth bearing in mind as we watch political leaders quietly hitch their wagons to the AI revolution. It may all end up a bit more complicated that sitting and waiting for AI to save the public purse.

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