15. September 2026 1 min reading time
AI meets IT security
At the moment, it seems difficult to keep up with developments in artificial intelligence. Hardly a week goes by without reports of new breakthroughs. This rapid progress comes at a considerable cost to the pioneers of AI. (Disclaimer: What follows is a brief detour into the world of finance to demonstrate the scale of the current transformation. Don’t worry, we’ll be back on track in a moment. But even for me, as a technician, the figures were impressive.)
Is the AI transformation bigger than the railway expansion and the Apollo programme?
An article in the Wall StreetJournal¹ published in early 2026compared the expected investments by Meta, Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet in AI and data centre infrastructure with historical US infrastructure and technology programmes. According to the article, the expenditure forecast for these four companies in 2026 amounts to around 2.1 per cent of US GDP. This exceeds the average annual expenditure on US railway expansion in the 1850s and is significantly higher than that of the Apollo space programme (0.2 per cent), which, after all, did put humans on the Moon:
