To fund AI boom, tech plans plumbing upgrade

Microsoft, Meta and Google's parent Alphabet are going to spend billions on infrastructure

- KAREN WEISE

If 2023 was the tech industry's year of the AI chatbot, 2024 is turning out to be the year of AI plumbing. 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 centres to support artificial intelligence. 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 could last for years.

Microsoft, Meta, and Google's parent company, Alphabet, disclosed this week that they had spent more than $32 billion combined on data centres 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 Al spending.

In the clearest sign of how AI has become a story about building a massive technology infrastructure, Meta said on Wednesday that it needed to spend billions more on the chips and data centres for AI than it had previously signaled.