BILLIONS SPENT AND HYPOTETHICAL RETURNS:THE AI BOOM EXPLAINED WITH SIX CHARTS.

By Guardian - Dan Milmo/Aisha Down/Ana Lucía González Paz - 7 Jun 2026 12.00 BST

Expenditure is growing fast and consumer take-up accelerating. But alarm bells are sounding. The race is very much on. Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which makes AI models as well as space rockets, announced last week it is seeking a $1.77tn (£1.31tn) valuation on the US stock market while Anthropic, the startup behind the Claude chatbot, said it had filed for an initial public offering. OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, is expected to follow.

This latest peak in the AI market comes amid a multi-trillion-dollar spending spree on related infrastructure such as data-centers. Meanwhile, companies are attempting to deploy the technology in a way that makes investing in it worthwhile. Here’s a look at what stage the AI boom is at and six key charts that tell us how we got here.