@rohanpaul_ai: The Economist: Top 5 big labs will spend a huge $800 Bn this year real cash on AI infrastructure. But their profit stat…
Summary
The Economist reports that top five big tech labs will spend around $800 billion on AI infrastructure this year, with accounting practices masking the immediate cash impact as capital expenditure reaches 40% of revenue, surpassing previous booms.
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The Economist: Top 5 big labs will spend a huge $800 Bn this year real cash on AI infrastructure.
But their profit statements hardly notice these investments, since depreciation begins only after the assets are built, and then happens slowly.
When a company buys AI servers, GPUs, buildings, power systems, and networking equipment, accounting treats those as assets, not normal expenses.
So the profit statement does not show the full $800B hit right away.
But the cashflow statement shows the truth more directly: the money has already left the company.
The scary part is the scale: these firms may spend around 40% of their revenue on capital expenditure this year.
That is bigger than the oil industry’s shale-boom spending and bigger than telecom spending during the dotcom bubble.
economist .com/business/2026/05/13/big-tech-is-sacrificing-its-cashflows-to-prop-up-the-ai-boom
“There is a “real possibility that AI will displace human labor at a very large scale…. We find internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief, and unease. I don’t know what that means, but I think it warrants ongoing discernment.”
~ Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah
At Vatican event (Pope Leo XIV’s presentation held today in the Synod Hall).
From “Associated Press” YouTube channel, (link in comment)
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