But this stuff takes years. Until then, the massive spending from corporate balance sheets and cash flows that circulates & circulates is very stimulative of the economy.
By Wolf Richter for WOLF STREET.
The amount of money that gets spent on AI is just mind-boggling. This spending shows up in two categories on corporate financial statements: One on the income statement where it drives up expenses and pushes down earnings; and the other on the balance sheet, where it’s called “capital expenditures,” an asset, with no impact on expenses and earnings right now, but at a later date.
AI-related spending on the income statement that push down earnings include salaries of AI-related staff, additional office space, software services, electricity to power and cool AI data centers, costs of leasing AI servers, the engineering and design work that goes into all this, etc.
AI-related capital expenditures that go on the balance sheet as an asset include the purchases of AI servers with chips from Nvidia and others, construction or purchase of data centers – the size of AI data centers is expressed in the amount of electricity they can consume at capacity, such as a “500-megawatt data center” – the construction of powerplants and grid infrastructure to supply electricity to these data centers, the costs of reactivating nuclear reactors and retired fossil fuel plants, the land acquisition costs, etc.
These are vast amounts of money that are now getting spent. The Magnificent 7 talk a lot about it, Nvidia hyping the “insane demand” for its chips, and the others spending that money on those chips. Tesla has announced that it would expand its data centers to 500-megawatt centers, and then to 1,000 megawatt centers.
Microsoft said that it spent $20 billion on capital expenditures in the last quarter, not counting the stuff that it expensed to the income statement, such as the AI-related compensation costs. Meta said that it anticipates capital expenditures “of approximately $38 billion to $40 billion in 2024,” and that it expects “significant” growth of those capital expenditures in 2025, all related to AI. Amazon is on track to spend $75 billion on capital expenditures in 2024, up from $48 billion last year, and said it will spend even more next year. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy called AI a “maybe once-in-a-lifetime type of opportunity.” And then what?
But it’s not just these big companies that are spending the 10s of billions of dollars each on AI, and in ever larger amounts. It’s also less huge and smaller companies that are heavily spending on AI infrastructure, AI services, and AI-related compensation costs. AI startups are getting billions of dollars of funding. Then there are the utilities that are spending to provide the power to data centers, and construction companies building the AI infrastructure, AI consultants, AI conferences, AI whatever.
Companies are burning through their huge cash piles right now to do this, and they’re directing their operating cashflows into this, and some are borrowing to do this.
Since this spending comes from corporate balance sheets and from cashflows from other operations, they’re essentially recycling that cash that they would otherwise have invested in T-bills and other securities and they’re plowing it into the economy, and it begins to circulate.
AI workers and construction workers and the people that make their sandwiches are spending their income, and people and companies that receive that spending are also spending it, and the cash that was stuck on corporate balance sheets begins to circulate, and operating cashflows circulate, and borrowed funds circulate, and it all circulates and circulates and creates economic activity, from restaurants to freight companies that ship the AI servers.
This is the Dotcom Bubble all over again, but bigger, and spread wider. This amount of spending that is circulating around the economy is very stimulative.
And what came out of the Dotcom Bubble was an immensely useable internet, where nearly everyone has broadband, even on their cellphones, and a lot of economic activity has moved to the internet, eventually decimating entire activities and replacing them with new activities.
But when the huge amounts of investments and spending by companies and venture capital firms slowed, and the slowdown circulated through the economy, just as the cash had circulated through it, the Dotcom Bust ensued, amid massive job destruction in internet-related tech.
During the Dotcom Bust, the affected companies cut spending, and those that went out of business stopped spending altogether. Tech workers saw their wealth vanish when their company’s stock went to zero or near zero, and then they lost their jobs, and they cut spending.
And people who weren’t in tech, but with lots of money in the stock market got beaten up, and those that were leveraged got crushed, and they cut spending too.
This reduction in spending and investment circulated, just like the cash had circulated, and it triggered the recession from March 2001 through November 2001. Ultimately the Nasdaq plunged 78%, and the S&P 500 50% over a two-and-half year period from March 2000 through September 2002. It took the S&P 500 13 years, and the Nasdaq 15 years – plus trillions of dollars of money printing – to surpass the March 2000 highs, and lots of stocks just vanished. But the internet has become an economy-changing force.
What could cause the next recession? AI spending too will slow someday, and then the hangover starts. We’ll hear about it during the earnings calls from Meta, Alphabet, etc. They’re already under pressure to show results and slow down this AI-related cash burn. And we’ll hear about it during the earnings calls from companies that sell the chips and servers.
And when Corporate America slows down AI-related capital expenditures, and “right-sizes” AI-related staff and other spending, it will circulate through the economy, leading to slowdowns at the companies that received that spending, and it circulates from there, accompanied by a significant selloff in stocks that whacks people’s sense of wealth, causing them to cut spending as well, even if they’re not in tech. And that may be when we finally get our recession.
But this stuff takes years. Until then, that kind of widespread spending from corporate balance sheets and cash flows that circulates and circulates is very stimulative of the economy.
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