Goldman Sachs recently predicted that technology companies, including Meta, Alphabet, and other hyperscalers, will likely invest $1.2 trillion next year.
The forecast point toward a $100 billion beat over current Wall Street expectations, continuing an aggressive buildout trend.
The AI race continues to move beyond software, as technology companies shift their focus to spending on data centers, advanced chips, and the energy needed to support more computing power.
As companies ramp up spending, AI is likely to play an even larger role in advertising, ecommerce, and search.
How Businesses Are Spending on AI Infrastructure
The increase in AI spending isn’t an accident. Technology’s biggest names are actively spending more money to keep up with competitors as AI tools continue to improve at a relentless pace.
Major technology companies like Alphabet and Amazon are spending significant sums on the infrastructure needed to support growing AI demand.
Notable areas of investment include:
- Chips and processors: Microsoft said it’s spending roughly two-thirds of its quarterly capital expenditures on AI hardware, including CPUs and GPUs.
- Cloud and AI capacity: Amazon has invested heavily in AWS infrastructure as it builds the computing capacity needed to compete in cloud services and AI. Those investments are helping AWS expand significantly already.
- Memory: Rising memory prices related to a shortage in DRAM are adding another significant expense to AI infrastructure spending, with memory prices climbing over 400% from 2024 until the end of this year.
- Power: Meta and BlackRock recently invested $14 billion in a new data center campus in El Paso, one of the latest examples of how crucial energy and cooling are to supporting AI computing at scale.
This level of investment in the different layers of AI infrastructure is helping leading technology companies expand the systems and capacity behind their rapidly evolving AI products and services. As investment continues to flow into computing capacity, power, memory, and data centers, AI tools should continue to become more capable and easier to deploy to more users.
What the AI Buildout Means for Brands
AI infrastructure investments continue to surprise experts, but brands may be able to use this shift in spending to their advantage.
As computing capacity scales up across the larger technology ecosystem, AI is gaining more influence over the decisions that shape how people search, shop, and evaluate brands.
Optimizing for AI-driven search is becoming more important as Big Tech makes models faster, more capable, and widely available. Brands that create content designed to surface in AI-generated answers can improve their chances of reaching the people most likely to engage with their products and services.
Ready to see how you measure up in AI search? Take Avenue Z’s AEO Readiness Quiz and see how your brand performs as AI quickly changes how customers make decisions online.
We Drive Influence
Win AI search, grow revenue and build reputation through PR and digital marketing.
