, Columnist
AI’s Big Guns Have a Serious Inflation Problem
A building site in Dresden, Germany for a future chip factory.
Photo: Robert Michael/picture alliance via Getty Images
AI infrastructure costs just keep on rising. Big tech firms are likely to invest several trillion dollars over the next few years to satisfy your ChatGPT and Claude habit.
But those massive capex bills aren’t just caused by so-called hyperscalers such as Microsoft Corp. and Meta Platforms Inc. building or leasing more and more datacenters. The price of components going into these gargantuan computing warehouses has gone up, too, forcing some of these companies to splurge more cash than they’d anticipated.