The AI money merry-go-round shows no sign of stopping as Meta, OpenAI, Nvidia, Amazon and Microsoft linked to deals worth nearly $200 billion

A hundred billion here, a hundred billion there. Pretty soon, you’re talking about real money. Today, we have staggering but somehow unsurprising news of money approaching a total of $200 billion being pumped into AI and involving all the usual suspects: Meta, OpenAI, Nvidia, Microsoft, and Amazon.

First up is a report that Meta is planning to double its spending on AI this year to $135 billion. Let’s just repeat that figure. $135 billion. It’s an incredible amount of money. It’s frankly incredible that Meta has that kind of money to spend speculatively on something that, currently, isn’t proving lucrative for anyone apart from the people selling the picks and axes to help you search for the money.

The BBC reports that Meta’s CEO said yesterday that he expects “2026 to be the year that AI dramatically changes the way we work.”

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Of course, you could argue that the big change in the way that Meta itself will “work” is that this spend represents a massive pivot away from virtual reality and the Metaverse, which was what Zuckerberg used to say would change the way we all work, in favour of AI.

But what of OpenAI, Nvidia, Microsoft and Amazon? Well, the story here is that the latter three are reportedly in talks to invest $60 billion in the former. The breakdown, according to The Information (via Reuters), is that Nvidia is looking at a $30 billion investment, Amazon up to $20 billion, and Microsoft could be in for the final mere $10 billion.

Who’s paying whom? (Image credit: Nvidia)

Inevitably, much of this is all very circular. How will OpenAI spend the $60 billion? Surely much of it will go on Nvidia GPUs. But there is also talk that these deals could involve an expansion of OpenAI’s existing cloud server rental deal with Amazon and likewise, enterprise sales of ChatGPT services back to Amazon, presumably with those services quite possibly running on Amazon servers. Which could contain Nvidia GPUs. And, well, you get the idea.

Notably, Sir Not Appearing in this roll call of AI money monsters is Google. That, at least to some extent, feels like a separate AI empire, most recently in possible collaboration with Apple, with the latter now rumoured to have struck up a deal to sort out its lagging Siri digital assistant courtesy of Google’s AI power.

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In the meantime, it’s unclear that anyone is currently or has any realistic imminent expectation to make real money at scale out of actual AI services, as opposed to making money out of tooling up to provide AI services.

So, it seems like we’ll have to wait a while longer for the AI money merry-go-round to take a few more turns before somebody starts making some cash or the whole thing simply seizes up.

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