Three months ago, Wall Street punished the world’s biggest tech companies for spending huge sums to develop artificial intelligence, only to get results that failed to justify the costs. Silicon Valley’s response this quarter? He plans to invest even more.

Capital spending by the four largest internet and software companies – Amazon, Microsoft, Meta and Alphabet – is expected to total well over $200 billion this year, a record sum for this profligate collective. Executives at each company warned investors this week that their splurges would continue next year, if not intensify.

This frenzy underscores the extreme costs and resources consumed by the global AI boom sparked by the arrival of ChatGPT. Tech giants are racing to secure scarce high-end chips and build the sprawling data centers that the technology demands. To do this, companies have entered into agreements with energy suppliers to power these facilities, even going so far as to restart a notorious nuclear power plant.

They are each trying to convince Wall Street that these huge investments will make their future businesses more profitable than those currently selling digital advertising, goods and software.

In an investor call Thursday, Amazon Chief Executive Andy Jassy called AI “a really unusually large, maybe once-in-a-lifetime kind of opportunity,” as evidenced by the projection of his company of a record $75 billion in spending for 2024. “I think our customers, the company and our shareholders will feel good about this long-term project and the fact that we are pursuing it aggressively. ” Analysts at MoffettNathanson called Amazon’s spending “truly staggering.”

A day earlier, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg pledged to invest more in AI language models and other futuristic projects that he now sees as central to his company’s future . Meta’s capital spending could reach $40 billion this year. At the same time, Alphabet’s capital budget was higher than Wall Street’s expectations, and its chief financial officer, Anat Ashkenazi, predicted “substantial” increases in 2025.