Tracking Trillions: The assumptions shaping the scale of the AI build-out

The AI CapEx debate is usually framed as a demand-side question—will adoption justify the spend?—but the size of the investment itself is not a single, fixed number. It is highly sensitive to a small set of assumptions about how the infrastructure itself is built and renewed. Four assumptions are most impactful in determining the scale of the build-out: 1. The economic useful life of AI silicon, where small shifts in replacement cadence move cumulative spend by hundreds of billions 2. The cost and complexity of next-generation data centres, which are rising as AI...