A view has emerged that big tech companies should not scrimp on spending on artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure investment.

On May 6, CNBC reported that Jim Cramer rejected concerns about overheating raised over strength in data centre and AI-related stocks. He said the current investment cycle is not about vaguely anticipating future demand, but about catching up with demand that has already occurred.

Cramer took issue with a view in parts of the market that interprets the data centre investment rally through a "Field of Dreams" logic. He said the idea that customers will follow if infrastructure is built first does not fit today’s AI market. "The key to this data centre rally is that it’s not some fairy tale," he said. "Data centres are actually being built and customers are actually coming in."

He did not see the current investment competition among cloud companies as simple overspending. He said that big customers such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta are already looking for computing resources and infrastructure partners that can handle massive AI workloads. "Big potential customers that can pay are already here," Cramer said. "If you don’t spend money to build the infrastructure, they will go elsewhere."

Cramer cited Amazon and Amazon Web Services (AWS) as representative examples. Amazon plans to carry out about $200 billion in capital expenditures this year, and most of it is expected to go to expanding data centre capacity. With competition intensifying among major cloud providers, it is judged that expanding data centres is a prerequisite for defending revenue and securing new demand.

Cramer said such investment decisions are less a choice than defensive. "If you don’t build the stadium, customers go elsewhere and you end up missing out on big money," he said, citing Amazon CEO Andy Jassy’s aggressive investment stance. He said that amid a shortage of data centre supply, slowing facility expansion does not make demand disappear but shifts it to competitors.

He also said market sceptics are still underestimating the scale and pace of AI spending. Cramer said companies that slow investment could lose business opportunities rather than reduce costs. He said if Amazon cuts investment, its performance figures may worsen rather than improve, and that demand and payments could move to Alphabet or Microsoft.

The trend shows that today’s AI infrastructure competition is both a race to get ahead to attract customers and a battle to defend existing ones. Expanding data centres is becoming a key condition not simply for adding facilities but for keeping major AI companies. "In data centres, if you build it, customers really do come," Cramer said. "If you don’t build it, those customers will just move to another operator that did."