AI market needs to make $6 trillion a year by 2031 to fund its infrastructure habit

The AI industry must generate $6 trillion in annual revenue by 2031 to keep funding the infrastructure needed to meet anticipated demand, and this will require imaginative new uses beyond simply enhancing employee productivity. That $6 trillion figure comes from the 2026 annual Global Technology Report from management consultants Bain & Company, which put its thinking cap on to figure out how the AI sector can possibly meet this challenge. It says the massive demand for AI compute infrastructure has revived the hardware industry. Some of the fastest growing segments include high-bandwidth memory (HBM) used in GPUs, advanced packaging and custom silicon, and application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) all scaling rapidly. As The Register reported last year, AI spending is actually keeping the US economy out of recession, with datacenter infrastructure and model development providing the only significant growth areas. …