Big Tech AI spending has now topped $1 trillion total

[Harbour]

So Big Tech has now blown past the trillion dollar mark on AI spending and honestly the number is almost too big to picture in a normal way

Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta have combined for over 1.1 trillion in capital spending since the AI boom kicked off back in 2023 and they are not slowing down either, with plans to spend another 745 billion just this year on data centers, chips and the power needed to run them all

What gets me is how fast this happened, these were companies that used to be relatively light on capital spending and now they are behaving more like utility companies or railroads building out physical infrastructure at a scale nobody has really seen before, not even during the dot com telecom boom of the 90s

The article makes a good point that past spending booms were spread across dozens of companies and many years but this time it's four companies moving at breakneck speed, which is either a sign of supreme confidence or a sign that nobody wants to be left behind and be the next Blockbuster

Investors seem split too, some are still rewarding the spending and some are starting to ask when the actual payoff shows up, Google's cloud unit reportedly spent more than it made last quarter for the first time in twenty years as a public company which is not exactly a comforting stat

Curious what people here think, is this the new industrial revolution or are we all about to watch the biggest capital misallocation in modern history play out in real time

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