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Google’s AI Master Plan in One Number
With its massive $85 billion war chest, Google is waging an infrastructure arms race to own the physical foundation of the AI revolution.
Alphabet, the parent company of Google, delivered a standout quarterly report on Wednesday, with robust growth across Search, YouTube, and Cloud. But beneath the strong revenues was a number that tells a much bigger story about the future of technology: $85 billion. That is Google’s new budget for capital expenditures this year, a stunning $10 billion increase from its previous February’s forecast.
This colossal sum is being poured into building more data centers, accelerating their construction, and filling them with tens of thousands of specialized servers and custom-designed chips. It proves that the price of competing in the AI era is a full-scale infrastructure war, and Google is determined to win it by out-building everyone else.
The reason for this massive spending is simple: demand for AI is growing at a nearly incomprehensible rate. CEO Sundar Pichai provided a metric to make this abstract concept tangible. In May, Google’s systems processed 480 trillion “tokens,” the basic units of data that AI models like Gemini use to read, write, and reason. Just a few months later, that number has more than doubled to 980 trillion monthly tokens.
Source: gizmodo.com
