Comment by benji-york
17 hours ago
> even if every adult on the planet spent 250$ on AI per year this would still not cover anywhere near what's being invested.
Your math does not make sense. That's something like $1.5 trillion every year. That's no where near what is being spent in AI hardware buildouts on an annual basis.
Last year estimated spend was $380 billion and this year it's $680 billion [0] just for the big five. Given global projections through 2030 being as high as 7 trillion [1], OPs comment seems at least the right order of magnitude.
[0]: https://futurumgroup.com/insights/ai-capex-2026-the-690b-inf...
[1]: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/technology-media-and-tel...
1. The estimates, for data center build outs in 2026 alone, in US alone, and even limiting just to the hyperscalers + oracle is in the 600 to 800 billions range.
And I'm ignoring the likes of Nvidia building their owns and smaller (but still huge) outside the biggest players. Or the comparably smaller, yet still multi billions spent in the rest of the world.
2. That excludes salaries, research, taxes, cost of running the datacenters themselves, etc.
In fact several estimates are pointing out that global annual spending on AI better be in the range of 3T$ range (that's almost a 1'000 $ / year per every adult in the world) or this is all going bust.
The math that does not make sense is to expect such a gargantuan spending to have any meaningful monetary return.
Gartner estimates that 2026 will have about $2.5 trillion in AI investments, with 2027 reaching over $3 trillion.
https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2026-05-1...
Those are totals, not annual spending.
Thank you for the correction.