Can AI Infrastructure Spending Keep Growing Exponentially?

Dylan Patel says AI capital spending cannot keep compounding at triple-digit rates from here. The build-out runs out of things to organize. The biggest neoclouds and hyperscalers already have trouble marshaling the resources for another gigawatt on top of what they are building, and raising the capital is hard even where the returns already look strong. The amounts are in the trillions of dollars.

The revenue math forces the same slowdown. Anthropic is going from under $10 billion of revenue to north of $100 billion in a single year, a 10x jump, and that pace does not produce a trillion dollars of revenue by the end of next year. Nvidia's revenue is still about doubling year on year, not tripling, because growing off a larger base is harder. The same limit applies to other firms, so the growth is decelerating.