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So today I want to talk to you about something that may surprise you. If we think that the huge investments in artificial intelligence data centers and infrastructure and the exceptional profits that companies like Amazon, Microsoft, or Nvidia are just about generative AI, We're missing something important.
All of this matters, generative AI, but in a different way. The real story is a broader shift in the economy towards computation. So let me take you through this shift and how it connects to what we're seeing in the news and how Gen AI fits in that picture.
We saw the results from many of the tech companies, many of the big tech firms, and they showed really staggering growth, particularly in their cloud businesses. Companies like Amazon and Google and Microsoft are known as hyperscalers because outside of the businesses we most think of them running, they also run computing capability for enterprises all over the world.
And those cloud businesses are growing really rapidly. Analysts reckon that Amazon's AWS grew more than 20% to about $33 billion in revenues. Google Cloud growing faster. It's the smallest of the three at about $15 billion in revenues. And Microsoft's Azure grew by some 40%. And we reckon a large part of that, as it was with Amazon and Google, AI workloads.
That is running their infrastructure to serve AI companies like OpenAI, like Anthropic, but more importantly, enterprises all over the world who are increasingly building AI services internally. It's not just about the data centers and the hyperscalers. Chip companies are seeing enormous orders.
I'm not sure many people would have predicted that Anthropic, a three-year-old startup, would buy a million AI processing units called TPUs from Google. And on that subject of Google, they said that 150 of their enterprise customers were using more than 1 trillion tokens from their LLM systems, which sounds like quite a lot. It's even more than I managed to use.
But those tokens are actually pretty cheap, so the dollar value is not as big as it might sound. Set against all of this, the tech giants will collectively invest, as we know, roughly $400 billion this year in the hardware to deliver AI. They'll invest more next year, and they'll invest more the year after that.
I think it's telling that Microsoft's boss Satya Nadella is talking about planet scale token factories. So is this all crazy talk? Is this exuberance? Is this excitement running ahead of where we are? Are we building capacity that we will never use? A famous episode of The Simpsons when the town of Springfield built a monorail. Is this the monorail for the global economy?
I think to make sense of that, let's think about what computing really is. I mean, computing is a way of systematically processing information using tools. We call those tools computers. And processing information is a really valuable thing to do. The computers we use today are of a particular type.
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