AIAI infrastructure investment bubble unlikely to burst by 2027: Macquarie

Investors are piling money into AI technologies – but revenues still have a long way to catch up, Macquarie’s Viktor Shvets says

2-MIN READ2-MIN

Listen

Google Data Center Southland is seen from the air in Council Bluffs, Iowa, on January 4, 2019. Photos: Reuters

Published: 7:00pm, 19 May 2026Updated: 7:34pm, 19 May 2026

Fuelled by excessive spending on artificial intelligence-linked commodities and computing capacity, AI infrastructure investment has become a global bubble that is unlikely to burst in 2026 or 2027, according to Viktor Shvets, head of global and Asia-Pacific strategy at Macquarie Group.

“There are many parts of AI … from the underlying technologies to infrastructure – the things that are going to run on the back of the infrastructure of models; automation, quantum computing, biotech, gene slicing and sequencing, all the rest of it … is going to run on top of that,” Shvets said at the Macquarie Asia Conference 2026 on Tuesday.

“The AI bubble absolutely [exists] at the low-end infrastructure end,” he said, adding that investors were piling money into a “transformative technology” long before revenue can catch up, referring to areas such as data centres, chips and related hardware.

The five hyperscalers – Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Oracle – were expected to spend a combined US$805 billion in capital expenditure in 2026 alone, according to Morgan Stanley’s latest estimates.

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Investors are piling money into AI technologies – but revenues still have a long way to catch up, Macquarie’s Viktor Shvets says

Investors are piling money into AI technologies – but revenues still have a long way to catch up, Macquarie’s Viktor Shvets says