Big Tech’s mammoth AI spend

Huge influence: An Amazon facility in New York. Its capital expenditure raises the risk that spending by a narrow set of affluent companies will distort big-picture economic data. — Bloomberg

Four of the biggest US technology companies together have forecast capital expenditures that will reach about US$650bil in 2026 – a mind-boggling tide of cash earmarked for new data centres and the long list of equipment needed to make them tick, including artificial intelligence (AI) chips, networking cables and backup generators.

The spending planned by Alphabet Inc, Amazon.com Inc, Meta Platforms Inc and Microsoft Corp, all in pursuit of dominance in the still-nascent market for AI tools, is a boom without a parallel this century.