Editorial - IBA Global Insight, August/September 2026

In June, following the IPO of his company SpaceX, Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire. As our column Artificial intelligence IPOs shift the paradigm points out, tech IPOs are raising immense sums to build bigger AI models. Current spending’s comparable with the internet build-out started in the ’90s, with heavy capital outlay long before revenues and profitability catch up. Those driving the latest tech boom appear to see no limits. Two appear obvious: one climate-related, the other finance-related. 

As this edition went to press, leading news websites were reporting widespread drought and wildfires across Europe. With half the UK in drought, the EU’s Drought Observatory describes conditions as critical in most of Europe. A typical hyperscale datacentre guzzles as much as five million gallons of water daily – enough for a town with a population of 50,000 people. Given this, it’s hard to believe any sane, sensible person would suggest we continue building datacentres at the current rate. The number of datacentres has doubled in five years to over 1,000 worldwide, and credible projections suggest the industry wants three times this by 2030. 

The second limit’s financial. Credible estimates put current global wealth at around $430tn. At the point Musk accumulated his first trillion, there was only another 429 to go round. Other tech giants, the hyperscalers – Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Oracle – are also among the wealthiest companies in the world: as well as its attention, tech appears to be sucking in the world’s wealth. 

But, the current travails of Oracle’s octogenarian centibillionaire Larry Ellison, as revealed in a brilliant New York Times investigation, serve as a reality check, a counterpoint to the hyperbole. He’s currently ranked fifth in a list of the mega-rich, behind Messrs Musk, Brin, Page and Bezos, and just ahead of Messrs Dell, Zuckerberg and Huang of Nvidia. Having made a mint through the first tech bubble, Ellison’s bet the farm on AI, built the world’s second largest datacentre in Malaysia (the largest is in China), and, having jetted from Florida to Washington to meet President Trump on the first day of his second term, was well-placed to persuade him to eviscerate the AI guardrails put in place by the Biden administration. But, with Oracle’s debt-to-equity ratio hitting 500 per cent (Alphabet’s is approximately 15–18 per cent) and, in July, Standard & Poor’s downgrading of Oracle’s debt to one notch above junk status, things look remarkably precarious. 

Whether it’s natural resources or finance, the limits are very much there.

Read Global Insight's August-September 2026 edition