A.I. Spending Is Accelerating Among Tech’s Biggest Companies

Four of the tech industry’s wealthiest companies made it clear this week that their spending on artificial intelligence was not about to slow down.

But the outlays from Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon — which all raised their spending by billions of dollars, saying they needed to meet demand for A.I. — are increasingly feeding concerns that the tech industry is heading toward a dangerous bubble.

Artificial intelligence remains an unproven and expensive technology that could take years to fully develop. How much companies will ultimately get back in return from A.I. products like chatbots is unclear. And smaller companies pursuing A.I. gold, financial analysts pointed out, are not nearly as wealthy.

Last week, the Bank of England wrote that while the building of data centers, which provide computing power for A.I., had so far largely come from the cash produced by the biggest companies, it would increasingly involve more debt. If A.I. underwhelms — or the systems ultimately require far less computing — there could be growing risk.

Concerns mushroomed this week after a series of earnings reports. On Wednesday, Google said it was increasing what it planned to spend on A.I. data center projects this year by $6 billion, after dropping nearly $64 billion on them over the past nine months.