Tech Companies Will Spend Seven Hundred Billion Dollars on A.I. in 2026

What Happened?

Big tech companies, including Nvidia, Google, Meta, Amazon, and Apple, are on track to spend a combined seven hundred billion dollars on A.I. data centers in 2026, according to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.

During the quarterly earning call for Nvidia, Mr. Huang also said he expected spending on A.I. to continue to increase in the next several years, adding that ‘this new way of computing is not going back.’

Data centers for A.I. will receive the bulk of that spending, and tech companies are building massive data centers around the world, not just in the United States. China, India, and Europe are among the top locations for data centers along with the United States.

Why it Matters

Significant increases in A.I. programs' performance and capabilities have fueled a new round of demand, which the new A.I. infrastructure is being built to sustain and grow.

In only the past year, the ability of A.I. programs to successfully carry out a wide range of tasks has improved substantially, leading a growing number of businesses to incorporate A.I. into their business models. What’s changed in 2026 is the market is no longer betting on A.I. to succeed; it is actively using A.I. every day in an increasing number of ways.

For example, by the end of 2025, A.I.-driven retail shopping had grown by eight hundred percent from the previous year. Walmart, the largest retailer in the United States, launched a new partnership with OpenAI, which allows shoppers to make purchases directly from the A.I. platform.

Agentic A.I. allows online buyers to tell the A.I. what they want, then the agentic program can make the purchase for them. The increase in online traffic to A.I. programs has led to a corresponding decrease in clicks on websites and traditional search engines like Google. 

As the A.I. programs continue to receive more online users and web traffic, businesses that aren’t visible to A.I. could gradually become invisible to potential customers. That has driven scores of businesses, large and small, to reconfigure their business models to look for ways to incorporate A.I. into their processes.

As more customers and businesses are integrated into A.I., the increased traffic will put more demand on the A.I. programs themselves. That increased demand is fueling the extraordinary growth of A.I. infrastructure, like massive data centers.

The secondary effects of the A.I. infrastructure growth include a booming job market for those building data centers and an increase in the construction of stand-alone power supplies. Some data centers have their own power plants, or soon will, that are not connected to the larger power grid but instead are dedicated to a specific data center.

How it Affects You

As more people access and interact with the internet through A.I., the way the internet functions is likely to undergo changes. For advertisers who are used to driving sales by funneling customers to websites, they will have to figure out how to advertise in such a way that their ads are still visible to users of A.I. platforms.