The implementation of artificial intelligence technologies is becoming an increasingly large financial burden for companies. According to Axios, many businesses are now spending more on IT projects and artificial intelligence than on employee salaries.
Nvidia Vice President Brian Catanzaro said that his team’s spending on computing resources “far exceeds personnel costs.”
A similar situation is observed in other companies. Uber’s CTO has already spent the entire AI budget allocated for 2026. Swan AI CEO Amos Bar-Joseph shared a post on social media, showing a large invoice from Anthropic, noting that their business “grows at the expense of intelligence, not headcount.”
According to Gartner forecasts, global IT spending will reach $6.31 trillion in 2026. This is an increase of 13.5% compared to the previous year. The main reason for the increase is investments in AI-related infrastructure, software and cloud services.
However, experts say that companies will have to prove the effectiveness of these large investments. Investors expect concrete results - increased productivity and revenue. Brad Owens asks: who is more effective - a person or a "digital worker"?
In the long term, the rising cost of AI services could turn these investments from a competitive advantage into a source of loss. If technology costs continue to rise, it is not excluded that human labor will again become a more profitable option.
At the same time, many companies plan to allocate more funds to AI by reducing the number of employees. In this context, Microsoft last week offered early retirement to 9 thousand employees.
