Can AI answer the $3 trillion question?
Three years ago, Sequoia partner David Cahn was one of the first people to do the math and put a number on on the implications of Silicon Valley’s titanic spend on AI infrastructure.
In 2023, he was reacting to Nvidia’s reported annual GPU revenue of $50 billion. Starting with that figure, and adding in the implied costs of operating the data centers and the margins for their operators, he deduced that $200 billion in revenue would be required to pay back the up-front investment.
He took it as a challenge, asking entrepreneurs to come up with AI products and services to make use of, and generate revenue from, all that infrastructure. Fast forward to today, adding up three years of hyperscaling, and Cahn’s got a new number on AI infrastructure spending for 2026: $1.5 trillion.
All told, he calculates that the AI industry will have to earn $3 trillion...
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