Which Big Tech Company Is Spending The Most On AI Data Centers? 🤖

What We're Showing

The total AI capital expenditures and data center operating costs for Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Amazon.

AI capital expenditures are one-time or infrequent investments in long-term AI assets and infrastructure.

Data center operating costs are ongoing expenses for running and maintaining AI data centers on a day-to-day basis

Data comes from New Street Research via JP Morgan and is updated as of August 2024.

Figures are in billions. Operating costs include cash operating expenses, software, depreciation, and electricity.

Training AI Models Is Eating Up Costs

Google and Amazon both currently spend more than twice as much training their models as they do running them for their end-use customers (inference).

Training costs for major AI models is getting increasingly expensive, as it requires large data sets, complex calculations, and substantial computational resources, often involving powerful GPUs and significant energy consumption.

However, as the frequency and scale of AI model deployments continue to grow, the cumulative cost of inference is likely to surpass these initial training costs, which is already the case for OpenAI's ChatGPT.