The AI spending spree just keeps getting weirder

The binge has outgrown its data-center-only era, dragging turbines, pipelines, private credit, and anti-LLM moonshots into AI’s widening orbit

AI is everywhere. So Silicon Valley set out to buy more chips and build more server farms. But now, it has started redrawing whole sections of the economy around AI’s appetite. The tech has reached an aisle with gas turbines, sovereign wealth funds, jet engines, and billion-dollar arguments over whether the reigning model-building gospel has been headed down the wrong runway all along.

Neighboring industries keep waking up to discover they’ve been drafted into the AI economy. A supersonic-jet startup has a $1.25 billion order to power AI data centers. Google $GOOGL has bought an energy developer. Meta $META has helped turn a Louisiana data center into a $27.3 billion private-debt spectacle. And Yann LeCun, after years of insisting that Silicon Valley’s favorite AI assumptions have limits, has raised $1.03 billion to chase “world models,” instead.

AI capital is still buying the familiar hardware. But it’s also wandering into stranger territory with the swagger of a rich industry that’s getting even richer and has stopped asking whether something belongs in the AI story and started asking whether it can be bent to the AI story fast enough to secure more power or more time. Silicon Valley isn’t choosing between “scale harder” and “the LLM paradigm is intellectually busted.” The same ecosystem is writing checks to the lab buying gigawatt-scale compute and to the lab arguing next-token prediction will not get you to broadly capable agents.

The anti-casino is still being financed with casino money.

For a while, AI capex was easy to picture. More GPUs. Bigger clusters. Another desert or cornfield marked for a data center that’s the size of a small municipality. Sure, that picture still exists. Last week, Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines locked up at least one gigawatt of Nvidia $NVDA’s next-generation Vera Rubin systems — enough computing power that industry executives pegged its value at around $50 billion. Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs raised another $1 billion for “spatial intelligence.” Safe Superintelligence (SSI), Ilya Sutskever’s still-murky venture, raised $2 billion at a reported $32 billion valuation — despite having no public product. Even the dissent has a burn rate. The heretics have capital stacks.

The checks are getting larger, sure. But the money is getting restless. It’s now landing on rival theories, exotic structures, adjacent industries, and any corporate costume that gets more electricity, more land, more leverage, or more optionality into the system. The AI spending spree isn’t tidy anymore. It has lost the neat corporate silhouette it........

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