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 (an
amount of money spent for a particular purpose, especially as a first
investment in something（尤指用於第一次投資的）開支，費用)(聯合報說文解字，outlay是支出，近似expense/cost，原先指開業時的費用，現在常用於大型或長期投資，The company’s AI outlays doubled compared to last
year.) from Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon –
which all raised
their spending by billions of dollars, saying they needed to meet demand for
AI—are increasingly feeding concerns that the tech industry is heading toward a
dangerous bubble
(新聞常用字，dot-com bubble, tech
bubble, a stock market bubble).
AI remains an unproven and expensive
technology that could take years to fully develop. How much companies will ultimately
get back in return from AI products like chatbots is unclear. And smaller companies pursuing AI gold, financial
analysts pointed out, are not nearly as wealthy.
Last week, the Bank of England wrote that
while the building of data
centers(資料中心), which provide computing power(常用字，運算能力或算力) for AI, had so far largely come from the cash produced by the
biggest companies, it would increasingly involve more debt. If AI underwhelms (to fail to make someone, or people in general, feel any
excitement or admiration, or to make them feel less excitement or admiration
than expected未留下深刻印象)—or the systems ultimately
require far less computing
– there could be growing risk.
“This is a fast-evolving(瞬息萬變) topic, and the future is highly uncertain,” the bank wrote.
Concerns mushroomed (to increase very quickly迅速增長；迅速發展)this week after a series of earnings reports. On Wednesday, Google said it was
increasing what it planned to spend on AI data center projects this year by $6 billion,
after dropping
nearly $64 billion on them over the past nine months.
Microsoft said it had spent $35 billion in
its latest quarter, $5 billion more than what It had told investors to expect
just a few months ago. And Meta raised its spending forecast to at least $70 billion by the end
of the year, which would be nearly double what it spent last year.
On Thursday, Amazon also said it would be “very aggressive” in
adding more data centers
and would spend $125 billion this year on capital expenditures—and even more next year.
Google, Microsoft and Amazon, which are the
three largest providers of cloud computing in the United States, said they did
not have enough computing
power to meet customer demand. That’s despite those three and Meta shelling out (to pay or give money for
something, usually unwillingly（通常指不情願地）支付，拿出（錢）)a combined(合計) $112 billion in just the past three months on capital expenditures,
which included construction of data centers. Over the past 12 months, the four spent a total of
more than $360 billion in capital
expenditures.
(Karen Weise)
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