Google announced it will spend $190 billion on AI this year. That is not a typo. That is not a projection for a decade. That is the annual budget for making computers say things that sound vaguely useful while pretending nobody noticed the search results got worse.

For context, $190 billion is more than the GDP of most countries. It is also more than Google’s entire annual revenue was fifteen years ago. The company is now spending roughly the equivalent of a small nation’s economy on infrastructure to power a chatbot that hallucinates pizza recipes with the confidence of a TikTok influencer.

Why does it cost this much? Because AI requires data centers. Data centers require electricity. Electricity requires money. And somewhere along the line, someone at Google decided that the solution to slowing search growth was not to improve search—it was to build the digital equivalent of a Las Vegas casino that runs 24/7 and occasionally tells you that putting glue on pizza is fine because it is “technically a source of calcium.”

The spending is spiraling because the economics of large language models are fundamentally broken. You need enormous computational power to train them. You need enormous computational power to run them. And you need to do this billions of times per day because millions of people are now asking AI to write their emails, their code, their apologies to their spouses. Each query burns electricity. Each electricity bill burns cash.

Google’s shareholders are watching this with the expression of someone who bought a house and discovered the previous owner left a coal furnace running in the basement. The company is profitable, sure. But at what point does the profit margin shrink so far that the entire venture becomes a very expensive way to say “we are also doing AI, please do not leave us.”

The real absurdity is that nobody knows if any of this will work. Google is betting $190 billion that AI will become so essential, so integrated into every product, that the cost will eventually justify itself. It is the corporate equivalent of putting all your savings into lottery tickets because the jackpot is theoretically infinite.