95 To understand where technology CapEx is heading, it helps to look at where it’s been. Over the past two decades, tech CapEx has flexed upward at points through data’s long arc – first toward storage / access, then toward distribution / scale, and now toward computation / intelligence. The earliest wave saw CapEx pouring into building internet infrastructure – massive server farms, undersea cables, and early data centers that enabled Amazon, Microsoft, Google and others to lay the foundation for cloud computing. That was the first phase: store it, organize it, serve it. The second wave – still unfolding – has been about supercharging compute for data-heavy AI workloads, a natural evolution of cloud computing. Hyperscaler* CapEx budgets now tilt increasingly toward specialized chips (GPUs, TPUs, AI accelerators…), liquid cooling, and frontier data center design. In 2019, AI was a research feature; by 2023, it was a capital expenditure line item. Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith put it well in a 4/25 blog post: Like electricity and other general-purpose technologies in the past, AI and cloud datacenters represent the next stage of industrialization. The world's biggest tech companies are spending tens of billions annually – not just to gather data, but to learn from it, reason with it and monetize it in real time. It’s still about data – but now, the advantage goes to those who can train on it fastest, personalize it deepest, and deploy it widest. *Hyperscalers (large data center operators) are Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Alibaba Cloud, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), IBM Cloud & Tencent Cloud. AI User + Usage + CapEx Growth = Unprecedented