A trillion of AI investment will ultimately be wasted – but the technology could yield ten times that in value, says Nick Murray-Leslie

The world has seen investment frenzies before – the railway mania of the 19th century, the dotcom boom of the late 1990s and the crypto surge of the 2020s. But what we are witnessing in artificial intelligence today dwarfs them all.

According to recent analysis by the Financial Times, US venture capitalists have already poured $161bn into AI this year – roughly two-thirds of their total spend. That figure towers over the $10.5bn invested into internet companies in 2000 (around $20bn in today’s money) and even exceeds the $135bn spent at the peak of the SaaS boom in 2021. The current AI wave is, quite simply, investment on another scale altogether.

The beneficiaries of this capital flood are, for now, a small elite. Ten companies – including OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Databricks, Perplexity and Scale AI –........

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