AI infrastructure: why compute power is becoming the new gold

In today's BNR Tech Update, I gave some context to the announcements of massive investments in datacenters for 2026.

Last week, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet reported their quarterly earnings. Combined, they will invest €615 billion in AI infrastructure in 2026: datacenters, chips and the power to keep it all running. And that's before the off-balance-sheet financing.

To put that in perspective: the entire Dutch national budget for 2026 is about €450 billion. Four American tech companies are spending over 35% more than that on AI infrastructure alone.

Big Tech is turning into a modern utility industry

Big Tech, which traditionally held few physical assets, is quietly transforming into a set of modern utility companies, with balance sheets and electricity bills to match.

One deal captures the moment perfectly. Anthropic, the company behind Claude, just signed an agreement to buy all available compute from a SpaceX datacenter in Memphis: 300 megawatts, enough to power a mid-sized Dutch city. Remarkable, because it was struck with Elon Musk, who had publicly attacked Anthropic only weeks earlier. The hunger for compute now overrides everything: personal, ideological, geopolitical.

The hidden trade-off: replacing labour costs with compute costs

Meanwhile, layoffs are on the rise. Microsoft offered voluntary early retirement to 7% of its US workforce. Cloudflare announced cuts of around 20% of jobs, citing a 600% rise in internal AI usage in three months. Meta is letting thousands of vacancies go unfilled and planning to cut roughly 10% of staff.

There's a more uncomfortable signal underneath. Meta recently rolled out a program that logs keystrokes, mouse movements and periodic screenshots on work laptops. The official explanation is productivity. But once you've captured exactly how an employee works, an AI agent can learn the same task. Labour cost gets quietly swapped for compute cost. That's a new accounting reality, with consequences that reach far beyond Silicon Valley.

If agents really do take over significant chunks of knowledge work, we may witness something unprecedented: sustained GDP growth paired with rising unemployment. A small group of companies, and increasingly a small group of countries, will capture most of the upside.

So where does that leave the Netherlands?

We benefit industrially. ASML just raised its revenue guidance, lifted by the AI building boom, with hundreds of suppliers in its wake. But we have very little compute capacity on our own soil, datacenter construction faces strong public resistance, and our grid struggles to absorb the demand we already have. Our government speaks about digital sovereignty, but is not (yet?) acting on it.

The world is splitting into two kinds of economies: those with access to compute, and those without. The question for the Netherlands, and for Europe, is which side we want to be on.

🎧 Listen to the full discussion (in Dutch) in the audio here: https://www.bnr.nl/gemist?date=11-05-2026&time=11-19-55