Reuters: AI investment boom surpasses railway and internet bubbles; Anthropic plans $518B

On October 3, 2026, Reuters published a long article titled "AI's race to transform the world before the money runs out." The article compared the current wave of AI capital spending with the railway construction boom and the internet bubble of earlier eras. Its central claim is that no new technology has ever drawn such enormous amounts of money as AI does today. Railway building and the rise of the internet both produced major capital frenzies, Reuters wrote, but the scale of investment in those periods has already been exceeded by AI.

Reuters cited a PwC forecast that global cumulative investment in data centers alone could surpass $30 trillion by 2050. According to the article, that figure is almost equal to the outstanding balance of U.S. national debt. It also said that even after accounting for inflation, spending on AI infrastructure is far larger than the investment seen during the railway boom and the dot-com bubble. The $30 trillion estimate covers data centers alone, not the entire AI sector. The article used the comparison to illustrate the relative size of the current AI buildout, though it did not offer a final judgment on whether the spending is justified.

The same piece noted that Anthropic, one of the main participants in the AI race, plans to invest $518 billion over the next few years. Reuters did not provide a detailed breakdown of that spending in the excerpt available. Chinese tech outlet IT Home reported on the Reuters article on October 3, 2026, repeating the $30 trillion data-center projection and Anthropic's $518 billion plan. No subsequent developments beyond the Reuters article and IT Home's summary were included in the source material.