By Clancy Yeates
Publication Date: 2026-01-25 18:01:00
The enormous amounts of money being poured into artificial intelligence will remain one of the most important topics for stock market investors this year, but behind this buying frenzy lies a crucial question.
According to JP Morgan, building AI infrastructure such as data centers and power will cost more than US$5 trillion ($7.3 trillion) in the coming years, enough to make AI spending a serious impact on economic growth.
The investment boom is also contributing to huge stock valuations, leading to comparisons with the Australian mining boom at the start of this century and, of course, the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s and early 2000s.
But all this spending brings a…