AI industry needs to earn $600 billion per year to pay for massive hardware spend — fears of an AI bubble intensify in wake of Sequoia report

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Despite massive investments in AI infrastructure by high-tech giants, revenue growth from AI has yet to materialize, indicating a significant gap in the ecosystem's end-user value. In fact, David Cahn, a partner at Sequoia Capital, believes that AI companies will have to earn about $600 billion per year to pay for their AI infrastructure, such as datacenters.

Nvidia earned $47.5 billion in datacenter hardware revenue last year (with most hardware being compute GPUs for AI and HPC applications). Companies like AWS, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and many others invested heavily in their AI infrastructure in 2023 for applications like OpenAI's ChatGPT. However, will they earn that investment back? David Cahn believes this could mean that we are witnessing the growth of a financial bubble.