By Alex Blair
Publication Date: 2026-05-19 07:34:00
After four glorious honeymoon periods, the world is beginning to see the real impact of the now inevitable artificial intelligence boom.
Silicon Valley CEOs have long promised a bright future in which machines will do the boring work for us, ultimately leading to a more advanced society with fewer problems to solve.
Politicians around the world have quickly turned the narrative around the importance of “winning the AI race” on its head and are now heavily armed in an economy with increasingly expensive data centers to drive a phenomenon that has almost single-handedly propelled the post-Covid economy in the US.
The numbers are absolutely astonishing.
Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta alone are expected to spend around US$630 billion (A$879 billion) on data centers and AI chips in 2026 alone.
Consulting firm McKinsey estimates that global spending on data centers could reach US$7 trillion (AU$9.77 trillion) by 2030, with the US accounting for a huge share of that.
For most average…
