By Dan Milmo
Publication Date: 2026-01-17 12:00:00
Will the race to artificial general intelligence (AGI) lead us to a land of financial abundance – or will it end in a 2008-style bust? Trillions of dollars depend on the answer.
The numbers are staggering: an estimated $2.9 trillion (£2.2 trillion) is being spent on data centers, the central nervous system of AI tools; the more than $4 trillion market capitalization of Nvidia, the company that makes the chips for cutting-edge AI systems; and the $100 million sign-up bonuses that Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta is offering to top engineers at OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT.
These sky-high numbers are all backed by investors expecting a return on their trillions. AGI, a theoretical state of AI in which systems achieve human levels of intelligence in a range of tasks and are capable of replacing humans in white-collar jobs such as accounting and law, is a cornerstone of this financial promise.
It offers the prospect that computer systems can do profitable work without the associated costs of human labor – a…
