OOn an earnings call last month, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that the company would spend up to $185 billion on capital expenditures related to AI this year — an eye-popping figure that’s more than double the $90 billion it spent in 2025. But that could just be the start. Over the next several years, the tech giant’s data center spending will add up to a “significant investment,” Amin Vahdat, Google’s newly-minted Chief Technologist for AI infrastructure, tells Forbes in his first interview in the freshly-created role.

“Just in simple numbers, if there's a 10 year quote, and we're at $175 to $185 billion this year, one could imagine, assuming it's not going to go down, that this could extend to some big number over 10 years,” he says.

We did the math. At $185 billion a year, in eight years, Google would be spending $1.5 trillion, slightly more than OpenAI has committed to spend over the same time period. Extend that out to 10 years, as Vahdat noted, and Google would be spending $1.9 trillion.

Vahdat is clear that this is “not a promise” that Google would spend that much over the next 10 years. But the decade-long view he takes suggests the scope of Google’s bet. “The point here is that we are, at Google, investing at the highest levels,” he says.

There’s a big difference between Google’s data center ambitions and OpenAI’s: Google is a money-making machine. In the fourth quarter, Google parent Alphabet raked in $113 billion in revenue; for the full year, sales topped $400 billion for the........

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