The AI Boom Is a Dilemma for Retail Investors

Gamblers can inspire both awe and queasiness by pushing a pile of chips onto a single roulette number. Today’s tech giants are doing much the same with their outsize bets on warehouses full of expensive semiconductors, on the belief that generative artificial intelligence will soon drive the global economy. In filings in late April, four of the world’s largest tech companies disclosed plans to shell out a combined $725 billion on capital expenditures this year alone. OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman pegs his company’s data center budget through 2030 at $600 billion.

There’s more to this voracious spending than simply spinning the wheel and hoping for the best. It takes enormous amounts of computing power to train frontier AI models and keep them running, and the arms race dynamic has given the build-out perpetual urgency. Until recently the most prominent use of AI was in consumer-facing chatbots many people used for free, which raised questions about how big tech companies and richly valued startups would ever recoup their investments. This year, though, conversation has shifted with the rise of AI agents and coding tools, leading businesses to spend $37 billion on AI in 2025, according to tech investor Menlo Ventures. Still, we’re three years into the race kicked off by the release of ChatGPT, and no one can say for sure whether the unprecedented spending on generative AI will be worth it.