There isn’t an endless stream of revenue for AI as early adopters once thought. The gap between what’s being spent on the AI buildout and the revenue projected to come back is turning into a multitrillion-dollar chasm.
Data-center owners need to generate $8.5 trillion in cumulative revenue by the end of the decade to justify their investments, according to a press release last week by global research and advisory firm Gartner. But the firm forecasts that no more than $3.6 trillion of enterprise and consumer AI revenue can be attributed to those data centers over the same period—leaving a $4.9 trillion gap.
