AI frenzy: Are tech giants overbuilding data centers?

Big Tech firms may be making the wrong bet on what will assure them an edge in the age of GenAI

- SIDDHARTH PAI

Data centers are the new picks and shovels in the gold rush of the Generative AI age. US-based Meta recently announced plans to ramp up its AI infrastructure spending, allocating upwards of $40 billion to support its ambitions in artificial general intelligence. Amazon, Alphabet and Microsoft are not far behind, pouring billions into building, upgrading and acquiring data centers packed with high-end GPUs and custom AI chips. On the surface, this makes perfect sense: more models, data and computing power. But a growing chorus of researchers and technologists is beginning to ask a pointed question—what if we are preparing for a compute-heavy world that may never arrive?

Joe Tsai, chairman of Alibaba, raised this concern last week. "I start to see the beginning of some kind of bubble... I'm still astounded by the type of numbers that are being thrown around in the US about investing in AI," he said at a conference in Hong Kong. (shorturl.at/CkHGE).