Künstliche Intelligenz: Riskante Wette: KI‑Investitionen übersteigen eine Billion Dollar

The world's largest cloud providers, Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft, announced their financial figures in recent days. Together, they allocated approximately 173 billion dollars to capital investments in the most recent quarter, setting a record. When combined with capital investments from all cloud companies this year, the total reaches 967 billion dollars according to US bank JP Morgan.

This marks a historic moment: In recent weeks, total investments have surpassed the one billion dollar threshold. Analysts predict that spending will increase to more than 1.4 trillion dollars next year. Adrian O’Connell, Senior Research Director at IT consultancy Gartner, notes that it's a calculated gamble, with nobody confident about whether the investments will pay off.

The investors respond cautiously as a result: In just two days, the tech giants collectively lost almost 700 billion dollars in stock value. The defining event of this economic era appears to be the funding of the expansion of data centers by the so-called hyperscalers - the three largest cloud providers Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.

So far, they finance this expansion with cash flow from lucrative businesses such as software, online advertising, or cloud services. Combined, they plan to allocate 750 billion dollars to capital investments this year.