this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2026
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Wall Street spent years demanding AI investment, then panicked when AI investment showed up on the balance sheet: If Alphabet keeps printing record profits while building the infrastructure for the next decade, this may end up looking more like impatience than prudence. The market loves growth, until it has to pay for it.
That's because the amount of AI investment looks like orders of magnitude more than anyone is willing to pay for AI products.
They were happy about spending billions, but now the bubble is into the trillions and there isn't tens of trillions in market demand to make an investment that big pay off.
That assumes demand is fixed. Historically, the biggest technology shifts created entirely new markets that barely existed beforehand. Almost nobody predicted today’s cloud or app economy from early internet revenue. AI spending could still prove excessive, but current demand is a poor ceiling for what future demand might become.
"If you build it, they will come" refers to a homemade baseball field in a work of fiction. It's not a valid argument for spending trillions of dollars to support demand that doesn't exist just on the off chance that some day it might.