By Surbhi Jain
Publication Date: 2025-12-02 20:59:00
Everyone on Wall Street is busy celebrating the AI supercycle — until you try the math. This week, IBM (NYSE:IBM) CEO Arvind Krishna dropped a number so large it could stop the AI party cold.
At today’s costs, he told Decoder, it takes roughly $80 billion to build and fully equip a 1-gigawatt AI data center. And with nearly 100 gigawatts of hyperscale capacity already announced across the industry, that implies around $8 trillion in capital spending.
His conclusion was blunt: “There is no way you’re going to get a return on that,” arguing companies would need about $800 billion in profit just to service interest on that scale of investment.
AI Data Center Economics Look Broken
That warning lands right as Big Tech is flexing spending like price doesn’t matter. Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ:AMZN), Microsoft Corp (NASDAQ:MSFT), Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOG) and Meta Platforms Inc (NASDAQ:META) are pouring tens of billions into compute, GPUs, land, power and cooling in what…
