The $2.6 Trillion Question: Is the AI Boom Finally Facing Its Profitability Reckoning?
photocredit: Igor Omilaev Artificial intelligence spending has stopped looking like a trend and started looking like an entire economy unto itself. Global AI-related spending reached roughly $2.6 trillion in 2026, a 47% jump from the year before, while the four biggest hyperscalers — Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta — are guiding toward a combined $725 billion in capital expenditures this year alone, up 77% from 2025. Goldman Sachs projects the industry could pour $7.6 trillion into compute, data centers, and power between 2026 and 2031. Those are not the numbers of a niche technology bet. They are the numbers of an industrial buildout on the scale of the railroads, the electrical grid, or the interstate highway system. And that is precisely why 2026 ha...