By Emilio Crespo
The Artificial Intelligence race is a bottomless pit for the financial plans of big technology companies. Among them, the most cutting-edge AI developers go up to their eyeballs in debt to
Keep up with the competition and release new models and updates every few weeks.
In the last quarter, a dozen American and Chinese premium applications have seen the light. The investments, and the indebtedness, to produce, maintain and take advantage of this flow of developments have the
enough volume to trigger an economic crisis, like the “dot coms” in the year 2000, if profits do not meet expectations. And many economists believe it is difficult.
OpenAI, the company that inaugurated the AI revolution with its ChatGPT, is accelerating plans to go public because the enormous private and public financing it already obtains is not enough for its projects. Anthropic also wants to finance itself in this way, now at the forefront of the most powerful models.
Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet (Google) and Meta have budgeted investments of 700,000 million dollars in artificial intelligence this year compared to 410,000 in 2025. But The Wall Street Journal
He estimates that such expenses at those and five other large firms add up to much more. They have off-balance sheet commitments of three trillion dollars (trillion in the US) for data centers and equipment.
Also a report from the Japanese Nikkei stock index in July warned of a hidden debt in the technology sector of 1.65 trillion dollars.
Almost no one doubts that AI is the future. But its present hides a financial monster as threatening as the excesses already committed by uncontrolled models.