Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, Oracle and Meta are on track to spend $800 billion on artificial intelligence infrastructure in 2026. Goldman Sachs strategists forecast this expenditure will grow 54% to $1.2 trillion in 2027, exceeding the Wall Street consensus of $1.1 trillion. Total investment is projected to reach $1.4 trillion by 2028, though the growth rate will decelerate to 12% in that year.

The five largest U.S. cloud providers must generate roughly $300 billion in annual AI revenue to break even on these investments, Goldman estimates. A variation of $250 billion in next year's spending would shift S&P 500 earnings growth by approximately 6 percentage points. Potential returns face headwinds as token prices reach all time lows and rental costs for all but the newest GPUs decline.