Tech Giants Spent Over $1 Trillion on AI Infrastructure Since 2023

The AI boom is often dated back to autumn 2022 with the debut of ChatGPT, which turned OpenAI into one of the world's most valuable startups. According to the Financial Times calculations, over the past three and a half years, Alphabet (Google), Amazon (AWS), Microsoft, and Meta have collectively spent about $1.1 trillion on capital construction. In the current year, these four tech giants intend to spend $745 billion on building new data centers, purchasing compute accelerators and memory, and developing associated energy infrastructure. The companies will depend on startups OpenAI and Anthropic, which release increasingly advanced AI models but need both financial resources and computing power. Google, Amazon, and Microsoft have shown revenue growth in the cloud segment in the second quarter. Even Meta, which does not rent out its cloud resources, reported a 28% revenue increase to $61 billion, as AI helps target ads in its social networks. Google has allocated about $500 billion for future data center construction, Meta's total contracts reached $233 billion, Microsoft increased its data center rental contracts by over $130 billion, and together they accumulated nearly $900 billion in AI project commitments in the second quarter. Free cash flows of the four dropped to a decade low of $7 billion, with only Microsoft and Meta able to earn more than they spend. Amazon attributed this to an active construction of new data centers.