Meta's CMO says Big Tech's soaring spending on AI is 'aggressive, but not crazy' (www.businessinsider.com)

Meta's CMO Alex Schultz framed the current wave of Big Tech AI spending as "aggressive, but not crazy," saying Meta's multibillion-dollar investments are already paying off by improving ad tools and, crucially, content-ranking systems that drive user engagement. Meta plans roughly $72 billion in AI infrastructure spending this year (with more to come), joining Amazon, Google, Microsoft and private AI labs in pouring capital into chips, data centers and talent. Schultz and Goldman Sachs both argued the scale, while large, is smaller as a share of the economy than past tech booms, with AI investment under 1% of U.S. GDP versus 2–5% in earlier expansions. Technically, Schultz highlighted Meta's pivot to recommendation-driven "unconnected content" as a core product change enabled by models that personalize feeds and keep users on Facebook and Instagram. He pointed to the new Meta AI "Vibes" feed—short-form, AI-generated video—as an experiment with promising retention, while acknowledging video-generation models impose far higher compute and energy demands than text or image models. That raises infrastructure and environmental questions (power, water, grid stress) and fuels debates about trade-offs and safety, spurring conversations about scaling energy solutions like nuclear and desalination. The implication: Big Tech bets on AI could reshape platform economics and infrastructure needs, with near-term revenue gains but longer-term sustainability and governance challenges.