Top cloud providers to outspend Ireland's GDP on AI in 2026

The big cloud operators are ramping up investment in AI servers and infrastructure to meet demand for AI development and deployment, exacerbating the memory shortage caused by their insatiable growth.

Taiwan-based market watcher TrendForce estimates the world's eight biggest cloud providers – Google, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Oracle, Tencent, Alibaba, and Baidu – will lay out upwards of $710 billion in capex during 2026, about 61 percent more than last year.

According to figures disclosed earlier, the first four alone account for about $635 billion of that outlay, showing just how much the giant players dominate the market.

All of this spend – which adds up to more than the entire gross domestic product (GDP) of Ireland last year – is going on datacenters and the kit to fill them, including high-performance servers typically packed with GPU accelerators from Nvidia or AMD.

However, many increasingly invest in other accelerators such as custom-built application-specific integrated ...