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Title: 'Stratospheric' AI Spending By Four Wealthy Companies Reaches $360B
Just For Data Centers

Link: https://slashdot.org/story/25/11/08/0533205/s...

"Maybe you've heard that artificial intelligence is a bubble poised to
burst," writes a Washington Post technology columnist. "Maybe you have heard
that it isn't. (No one really knows either way, but that won't stop the bros
from jabbering about it constantly.)" "But I can confidently tell you that
the money being thrown around for AI is so huge that numbers have lost all
meaning." The companies pouring money in are so rich and so power-hungry (in
multiple meanings of that term) that our puny human brains cannot really
comprehend. So let's try to give some meaning and context to the
stratospheric numbers in AI. Is it a bubble? Eh, who knows. But it is
completely bonkers. In just the past year, the four richest companies
developing AI - Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta - have spent roughly $360
billion combined for big-ticket projects, which included building AI data
centers and stuffing them with computer chips and equipment, according to my
analysis of financial disclosures.... How do companies pay for the enormous
sums they are lavishing on AI? Mostly, these companies make so much money
that they can afford to go bananas... Eight of the world's top 10 most
valuable companies are AI-centric or AI-ish American corporate giants -
Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Broadcom, Meta and Tesla. That's
according to tallies from S&P Global Market Intelligence based on the
total price of the companies' stock held by investors. My analysis of the
S&P data shows that the collective worth of those eight giants, $23
trillion, is more than the value of the next 96 most valuable U.S. companies
put together, which includes many still very rich names such as JPMorgan,
Walmart, Visa and ExxonMobil. No. 1 on that list, the AI computer chip seller
Nvidia, last week become the first company in history to reach a stock market
value of $5 trillion. That alone was more than the value of entire stock
markets in most countries, Bloomberg News reported, other than the five
biggest (in the U.S., China, Japan, Hong Kong and India)... All the announced
or under-construction data centers for powering AI would consume roughly as
much electricity as 44 million households in the United States if they run
full tilt, according to a recent analysis by the Barclays investment bank as
reported by the Financial Times. For context, that's nearly one-third of the
total number of residential housing units in the entire country, according to
U.S. Census Bureau housing estimates for 2024.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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