The $750 Billion Question: AI CapEx Has Gone Off the Rails
I keep coming back to the same thought: who is this all for?
OpenAI just ballooned its projected spend through 2030 to $750 billion, up 25% from their 2026 estimate. The first campus alone, Project Camellia in Georgia, is a 1,400-acre data center drawing 3.2 gigawatts of power from Georgia Power. They're targeting deployment between 2028 and 2032. That's a half-billion-billion-dollar bet on a computing paradigm that most consumers still treat as a novelty chatbot.
Google Cloud reports revenue surged 82% year-over-year to $24.8 billion in Q2 2026, driven almost entirely by enterprise AI solutions. Alphabet's capex sits at $180-190 billion for 2026 with a cloud backlog of $514 billion. CEO Sundar Pichai signaled the payoff won't come until 2027. Half a trillion dollars in the pipeline and nobody's sure where it ends.
Nvidia isn't just sitting here watching their GPU business. They're deploying Jetson chips on a Lunar Outpost rover that will be the first GPU on the lunar surface. An orbital partner called Firefly Aerospace is putting Jetson on a satellite, and NASA is backing private lunar exploration campaigns. We are putting AI accelerators in space and I cannot pretend I saw that coming.
The valuations keep climbing. AI chip startup Etched hit a $10.3 billion valuation as of July 23, betting everything on specialized inference chips instead of general-purpose GPUs. Ex-Uber CEO Travis Kalanick's robotics company raised $1.7 billion led by a16z. Money men building robots and a startup going to the moon with edge AI silicon.
The scale is real and I don't know what to do with it. OpenAI wants to spend $750 billion across four years. Google's backlog is half a trillion with no clear product at the end of it. Enterprise AI adoption is happening -- Google Cloud proves that -- but consumer-facing AI still feels like cathedral-building for a faith nobody has finished worshipping yet.
Nobody knows the answer to whether any of this makes sense. And if they do, they aren't talking.
Related
More from the blog
AI Chip Shortage Is Making Smartphones More Expensive in India
India's smartphone shipments dropped 10% in Q2 2026 — not from weak demand, but from an AI chip shortage that's pushing RAM and storage prices up.
Free AI API Keys: How to Get 10M Tokens/Month and Frontier Models for $0
You don't need a massive budget to build with frontier LLMs. From smart routers to faucet sites, here is the current landscape of free AI API access.
Free local serving of GPT-OSS 120B just got real
GGUF quant of GPT-OSS 120B lands on HuggingFace — run the biggest open model locally via llama.cpp without a data center.
Anthropic's Opus 5 Is About Efficiency, Not Magic
Opus 5 costs the same as 4.8 but delivers more per token — a reminder that AI progress is increasingly about squeezing better outputs out of what we already have.