{"id":430025,"date":"2026-04-30T22:40:13","date_gmt":"2026-04-30T15:40:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.swingfish.trade\/blog\/market-news\/2026\/04\/ai-infrastructure-spending-is-the-largest-non-war-project-in-human-history\/"},"modified":"2026-04-30T22:40:13","modified_gmt":"2026-04-30T15:40:13","slug":"ai-infrastructure-spending-is-the-largest-non-war-project-in-human-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.swingfish.trade\/blog\/market-news\/2026\/04\/ai-infrastructure-spending-is-the-largest-non-war-project-in-human-history\/","title":{"rendered":"AI infrastructure spending is the largest non-war project in human history"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p>I often write that the industrial revolution was the biggest thing to happen in human history but we might be re-writing history right now.<\/p>\n<p>I want to underscore the amount of spending that&#8217;s going into AI right now because the numbers are almost unfathomable, something <a href=\"https:\/\/investinglive.com\/stocks\/no-one-understands-just-how-big-the-ai-capex-boom-is-some-perspective-20260429\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"follow\">I touched on<\/a> yesterday.<\/p>\n<p>Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta collectively plan to spend $725 billion on capex in 2026, up 77% from last year&#8217;s record $410 billion. Those numbers are accelerating. OpenAI will also spend $100-$125 billion and Anthropic might be in the $50 billion range. In China, they&#8217;re likely to be spending somewhere in the $100-$200 billion range and then you can add in another $100-$200 billion in costs for power, the grid, cooling, gas turbines, substations and land.<\/p>\n<p>All in, that&#8217;s somewhere in the $900 billion to $1.3 trillion range for this year alone, and no one is indicating any slowdown from there (at least not yet).<\/p>\n<p>These are truly staggering numbers that I want to put into perspective:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>That&#8217;s around double the cost of the entire 35-year project of building the US interstate highway system, which took 35 years (inflation adjusted)<\/li>\n<li>Slightly below the entire UK government budget and roughly double Germany&#8217;s federal budget<\/li>\n<li>About 1.5x Japan&#8217;s budget<\/li>\n<li>Larger than the GDP of every country except the USA<\/li>\n<li>About 4x larger than the multi-year Apollo project to put a man on the moon (inflation adjusted)<\/li>\n<li>Apollo spending peaked at 4.4% of Federal spending, AI capex right now is equivalent to 15-20% of US government spending<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Here is the big one: The estimated total spending on WWII in today&#8217;s dollars was $4-7 trillion, globally for the duration of the war. At this pace, AI spending will match that. For the US alone, peak WWII spending was $1 trillion per year in today&#8217;s dollars and US AI spending alone this year is close to that. Now as a percentage of GDP it&#8217;s much smaller but the sheer scale of it is the same.<\/p>\n<p>In terms of private capital, there has never been anything like it, nothing close.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;and the application of it all is: Replacing human thinking.<\/p>\n<p>                            This article was written by Adam Button at investinglive.com.<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I often write that the industrial revolution was the biggest thing to happen in human history but we might be re-writing history right now. I want to underscore the amount of spending that&#8217;s going into AI right now because the numbers are almost unfathomable, something I touched on yesterday. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta collectively [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":216,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[86],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-430025","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-market-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swingfish.trade\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/430025","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swingfish.trade\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swingfish.trade\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swingfish.trade\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/216"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swingfish.trade\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=430025"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.swingfish.trade\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/430025\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swingfish.trade\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=430025"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swingfish.trade\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=430025"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swingfish.trade\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=430025"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}