Sridhar Vembu says AI is the only technology that will matter as Big Tech doubles down on infrastructure spending

Zoho co-founder Sridhar Vembu has weighed in on the global artificial intelligence boom, arguing that AI is not just another technological shift but the foundation upon which future innovation across industries will be built.

In a post on X, Vembu said the extraordinary surge in AI investment is rooted in a simple belief: that sufficiently advanced AI will be able to reinvent and improve virtually every other technology. If that assumption holds true, he suggested, AI becomes the only field worth pursuing.

"The premise behind the extraordinary AI investment wave is this: the only technology that will matter is AI," Vembu wrote. "All other technologies will be subsumed by AI because they can all be reinvented and vastly improved by a powerful enough AI."

AI as the foundation for future innovation

Expanding on his argument, Vembu pointed to some of the world's biggest challenges, saying AI could help accelerate solutions for climate change, develop new medicines for cancer and improve housing affordability in cities. He even suggested AI could one day contribute to ending wars, though he acknowledged that claim might itself be "my hallucination".

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He concluded by asking a direct question to readers: "If you accept the fundamental premise and the concrete examples listed above, the only technology worth working on is AI. Do you accept the premise?"

His comments arrive at a time when technology giants are investing at an unprecedented pace to secure their position in the AI race. Meta, Microsoft and Google alone have collectively committed more than $220 billion towards AI infrastructure in 2025 as competition intensifies to build larger data centres and expand computing capacity.

Microsoft has earmarked around $80 billion for AI infrastructure, while Meta expects to spend between $66 billion and $72 billion. Google's capital expenditure has climbed to $91.4 billion, with much of that directed towards AI servers, chips and data centres needed to train increasingly sophisticated models.

Massive spending sparks bubble concerns

The scale of investment has prompted inevitable comparisons with the dot-com boom of the late 1990s. However, valuation expert Aswath Damodaran, professor at New York University's Stern School of Business, believes today's AI spending cycle differs in one critical way.

Unlike the internet boom, where many companies required relatively modest infrastructure and relied largely on equity funding, the AI era is being fuelled by vast expenditure on data centres, semiconductor manufacturing, computing hardware and energy-intensive systems. That makes the financial stakes significantly higher if expectations fail to materialise.

Describing the current spending spree as unlike anything he has witnessed in modern business, Damodaran said the build-out of AI infrastructure rivals the investment wave that accompanied the early automobile industry. While optimism around AI remains strong, the combination of record capital commitments and uncertain long-term returns has also raised questions about whether the industry is laying the groundwork for its next breakthrough—or its next correction.