Are investors really getting cold feet about the AI boom?

THE data centre infrastructure boom fuelled the stock market’s artificial intelligence euphoria: is it also now about to destroy it?

Unease about huge – and growing – capital spending has turned into a serious overhang for some of the biggest tech shares.

That was clear last week, when the stock market chose to focus on how Alphabet had burnt through cash for the first time in its history as a public company, rather than the surprising leap in cloud revenue and profitability that the spending had made possible.