BIG TECH wants more computing power. A lot more. According to their latest quarterly reports, Alphabet (Google’s corporate parent), Amazon and Microsoft—the world’s cloud-computing giants—collectively invested $40bn between January and March, most of it in data centres equipped to deal with growing artificial-intelligence (AI) workloads. Last month Meta, which does not have a cloud business but does run a data-hungry social-media empire, said its capital expenditure could reach $40bn this year as a result of AI-related projects. That is not far off the $50bn that Saudi Aramco, an oil colossus, is planning to splurge. Microsoft is likely to spend more.
The comparison with
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