Bain projects AI will need $6 trillion in annual revenue by 2031 to justify today’s data centre buildout

Bain & Company’s latest technology report projects that the AI industry will need roughly $6 trillion in annual revenue by 2031 to support the data centres being built now. The firm estimates existing AI products may generate only $1.2 trillion to $1.8 trillion by then, leaving a large gap that Bain thinks could be filled by consumer and enterprise AI, ad-supported chatbots, autonomy, industrial automation, physical AI and still-undeveloped products. Bain also forecasts annual AI infrastructure spending could hit $1.5 trillion by 2031 and nearly 150 gigawatts of new data centre capacity by 2030, which it says would almost triple global capacity in five years.