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1. Big Tech’s massive spending on artificial intelligence is set to continue unchecked in 2025 after Amazon topped its rivals with a planned $100 billion-plus investment in infrastructure this year. Spending by the four leading US tech companies had already surged 63 per cent to historic levels last year. Now executives are vowing to accelerate their AI investments, dismissing concerns about the vast sums being bet on the nascent technology. Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon and Meta have reported combined capital expenditure of $246 billion in 2024, up from $151 billion in 2023. They forecast spending could exceed $320 billion this year as they compete to build data centres and fill them with clusters of specialised chips to remain at the forefront of AI large language model research. The scale of their spending ambitions — announced alongside their fourth-quarter earnings — has surprised the market and exacerbated a sell-off caused by the release of an innovative and cheap AI model from Chinese start-up DeepSeek in late January. (Source: ft.com)
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