What is this?

BubbleTracker shows what's being spent building AI infrastructure in 2026, and what's being earned back. All figures are sourced from institutional research and updated periodically. The site doesn't have an opinion about whether this is good or bad. It just shows the numbers.

How is the counter calculated?

Analysts project that the largest tech companies will spend approximately $690 billion on AI infrastructure in 2026. Divide that by the number of seconds in a year (31,536,000) and you get roughly $21,878 per second. The counter starts from January 1, 2026 and ticks up in real time.

FAQ

Is AI spending really this large?
Yes. Goldman Sachs, Bain & Company, and Morgan Stanley all project 2026 AI infrastructure capex in the $600–725B range across the major hyperscalers.
Are you saying AI is bad?
No. The site doesn't take a position. Whether this spending is justified is a question economists, analysts, and investors disagree about. The site just shows the numbers.
What is capex?
Capital expenditure: money spent on physical infrastructure, like data centers, chips, and power systems, rather than on salaries or day-to-day operations. When a tech company builds a data center, that's capex.
What is GDP?
Gross Domestic Product: the total value of everything an economy produces. When analysts say AI capex is driving GDP growth, they mean the building of AI infrastructure is showing up as a significant portion of measured economic output.
Where does the data come from?
Every source is listed in the Sources & Reading List below. Primary sources include Goldman Sachs Global Institute, Gartner, Pantheon Macroeconomics, and Deutsche Bank. No data is fabricated or estimated by this site.
How often is the data updated?
Figures are updated when new institutional research is published. Each data point shows its as-of date in the source footnotes.
Who made this?
An independent side project, built to show the numbers clearly and let people draw their own conclusions.

Sources & Reading List

Every figure on the site comes from the research below. Click any link to read the original.