2025-09-15
8 分钟The Economist Hello, this is Alok Jha,
host of Babbage, our weekly podcast on science and technology.
Welcome to Editors Pics.
We've chosen an unmissable article from the latest edition of The Economist.
Please do have a listen.
It already ranks among the biggest investment booms in modern history.
This year,
America's large tech firms will spend nearly $400 billion on the infrastructure needed to run artificial intelligence or AI models.
OpenAI and Anthropic, the world's leading model makers, are raising billions every few months.
Their combined valuation is approaching half a trillion dollars.
Analysts reckon that by the end of 2028 the sum spent worldwide on data centres will exceed three trillion dollars.
The scale of these bets is so vast that it is worth asking what will happen at payback time.
Even if the technology succeeds, plenty of people will lose their shirts.
And if it doesn't, the economic and financial pain will be swift and severe.
Investors always flock to promising technologies,
but the AI rush is more extreme than many past booms.
Boosters say that artificial general intelligence or AGI models that are better than the average human at most cognitive tasks could be only a few years away.
The first firm to achieve it could reap unimaginable returns.
Investors and innovators know they may not be backing the right model,
but if they spend slowly and cautiously, they may as well not bother to spend at all.