AI is forcing Big Tech to do something it’s never done: Spend more than it earns, and Wall Street hates it
https://fortune.com/2026/07/23/ai-big-tech-never-spend-more-than-earns-wall-street-hates-it/Open linkView original on lemmy.todaySyndicated from the fediverse. Read and engage on the original instance.
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45 replies
Except they did it for decades in some cases
Something it's never done? Tech is notorious for spending more than it earns. See: the Dot Com bubble.
Every 'disruptive' technology in the past decade as well.
It‘s how virtually every startup in Silicon Valley still operates. Bait and Switch is the business model of the 21st century.
that was 30 years ago. for the last 20 years tech has had blank cheques thrown at them.
False
Turns out it's hard to make money if you don't sell infinite free copies of a product that you only have to produce once.
I thought Big Tech loved burning money.
Man, I miss MoviePass... For $9.99/mo, it converted venture capital into something people could directly enjoy by watching as many movies as possible!
They aren’t “forced” to do anything. They are choosing to throw money down a black hole.
Not really true.
If they stop, it's over for them.
They have to keep digging hoping for something big to happen: IPO and rake in cash from retirements; big government programs with guaranteed vendor lock-in; or stumbling upon an AGI and winning the '''''''race'''''''.
If the market wakes up from the hypertrend before that, they are absolutely fucked.
We get fucked in every scenario, btw.
Well, I’ve learned to think of these things as wealth transfers — is that fair in this context.? Question is, where’s all the money going that big tech is loosing? To power companies, or is more complex than that?
it's going to Nvidia, Samsung, Micron, western Digital. companies that make hardware components. those are the pickaxes in this story.
Also maybe construction companies etc who build the data centres... They don't care if the centre is ultimately profitable... They're getting paid now.
Construction companies run pretty tight margins because it's an industry with a lot of competition. I'm sure they're not hurting, but the niche component suppliers are robbing the economy blind.
Remember, the execs are bonusing themselves. They are all getting filthy rich right now.
(And like all scams, they don't care about efficiency.)
It's going in a circle, eventually ending up at nvidia and co.
also effectively wasting planets resources
Lol big tech loves speculating. It's a bubble, and if not now, when? ... Delivering real products is such a pain in the ass.
It’s fucking bandwagoning. That’s it. That’s all this is. I hope the market destroys them for it.
Wall Street spent years demanding AI investment, then panicked when AI investment showed up on the balance sheet: If Alphabet keeps printing record profits while building the infrastructure for the next decade, this may end up looking more like impatience than prudence. The market loves growth, until it has to pay for it.
That's because the amount of AI investment looks like orders of magnitude more than anyone is willing to pay for AI products.
They were happy about spending billions, but now the bubble is into the trillions and there isn't tens of trillions in market demand to make an investment that big pay off.
That assumes demand is fixed. Historically, the biggest technology shifts created entirely new markets that barely existed beforehand. Almost nobody predicted today’s cloud or app economy from early internet revenue. AI spending could still prove excessive, but current demand is a poor ceiling for what future demand might become.
Current buyers are looking to cut back on spending, rather than dramatically increase. And that's based on current prices which are being subsidised by burning investor money, not the prices they need to charge to make a profit.
Cloud and apps didn't need trillions in investment to still not get off the ground. There isn't really any scenario in which current AI spending doesn't turn out to be excessive.
Maybe, but »excessive investment« and »failed technology« aren’t the same thing: Railroads, fiber optics and the dot com era all burned absurd amounts of capital, yet the infrastructure outlived the investors. AI could follow the same pattern: terrible returns for today’s shareholders, enormous value for tomorrow’s economy.
Yeah, but the AI infrastructure is made out of compute hardware that's going to need replaced in 6 years. Not rails that will still be useable in 50 years.
We aren't building lasting infrastructure other than the actual buildings.
I’d argue the models and software are the real long term assets. GPUs depreciate like any other hardware, but a better training pipeline, inference stack, proprietary data, and a model with millions of paying users can survive multiple hardware generations. The chips are replaceable. The ecosystem and customer relationships are much harder to replicate.
Yeah, there’s a lot of innovation going on to run powerful models on modest hardware and the state of the art for running local models is changing all the time. If the trend continues, models hosted in a data center will only be for niche use cases.
That would certainly be the good ending, I won’t hold my breath for it
"If you build it, they will come" refers to a homemade baseball field in a work of fiction. It's not a valid argument for spending trillions of dollars to support demand that doesn't exist just on the off chance that some day it might.
It will be interesting how this plays out. The only bright spot of the bullshit Trump economy is Wall Street's success and AI investing is what is driving that.
Don't forget Trump has made oil way more expensive. That's a huge favor to the world and the things that live on it!
He's also decimated environmental regulation...so, definitely not a huge favour.
Only in the USA. Which is only part of North America. The world is a big place.
We all live on earth and climate change is global
ha ha ai bad
Just took a quick look at your comment history because this one gave me deja vu.
I don’t think you’re a bot or anything, but I’m intrigued. Genuinely, what’s your motivation? If you’re so satisfied and confident with AI why not just go and enjoy the many fulfilling hobbies and the rewarding technical job that you brag about? If I had invested in google early on like you claim this situation is identical to, I’d be super chilled out about it instead of preemptively gloating and proclaiming that I was “obviously correct”.
It’s been a remarkable thing to be threatened, for years now, to be “left behind” by people who never seem to be able to leave. Really, why not just go? What’s holding you back? Is your super useful weather app not raking in enough money? Can’t you easily make like ten apps a day? Nobody’s ever been able to explain to me where all this supposed “obvious” usefulness is actually being applied. You all just appear to be totally stuck in the mud
nah you’re overthinking it
im just bored of anti-ai, anti-musk, anti-america topics
basically asking lemmy to get a hobby, lets try and fill out some of the other comms not concerned with politics but it comes out as ha ha <ai/musk/america/cars/etc> bad
at least it looks like lemmy has moved on from israel/palestine at least
So instead of engaging in your many ai-powered hobbies you choose to hang out in a boring place to criticize the boring discussion topics of boring people?
sadly this place exists, i wish it didn’t tbh and i could go back to reddit and not be the centre of attention again
Why hang out somewhere you wish didn’t exist?
i hate america more than I hate the people here
Moving on when nothing has been resolved is problematic. Well, as a society more than as a discussion group anyway.
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