AI plumbing. It may not sound as exciting, but tens of billions of dollars are quickly being spent on behind-the-scenes technology for the industry's AI boom.
Companies from Amazon to Meta are revamping their data centers to support AI. They are investing in huge new facilities, while even places like Saudi Arabia are racing to build supercomputers to handle AI. Nearly everyone with a foot in tech or giant piles of money, it seems, is jumping into a spending frenzy that some believe could last for years.
Microsoft, Meta, and Google's parent company, Alphabet, disclosed this past week that they had spent more than $32 billion combined on data centers and other capital expenses in just the first three months of the year. The companies all said in calls with investors that they had no plans to slow down their AI spending.
In the clearest sign of how AI has become a story about building a massive technology infrastructure, Meta said Wednesday that it needed to spend billions more on chips and data centers for AI than it had previously signaled.
«I think it makes sense to go for it, and we're going to,» Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a call with investors.
The eye-popping spending reflects an old parable in Silicon Valley: The