Jamie Dimon says AI spending could hit $1 trillion next year: what it means for Pakistan

JPMorgan Chase chief executive Jamie Dimon has said that capital spending on artificial intelligence by the big cloud companies could reach $1 trillion next year, up from an estimated $725 billion in 2026. He made the remark at a JPMorgan conference in India, and has repeated the trillion-dollar forecast through the year while also warning that some of that money will be wasted.

That is a number worth understanding, because Pakistan sits downstream of it in three concrete ways.

More work for Pakistan's IT exporters

The AI build-out runs on services: data labelling, model fine-tuning, testing, back-office and support work. Pakistan's IT and IT-enabled services exports have been the one reliably growing line in the external account, and a bigger global AI budget means more contracts flowing to Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad software houses and to the country's large base of freelancers. If you bill overseas clients for this kind of work, our freelancer tax calculator shows what you keep after tax at the current rates.

Pressure on power and chips

AI data centres are hungry for electricity and high-end chips. That global demand keeps advanced GPUs scarce and expensive, which filters down to what Pakistani startups pay for cloud compute and what local data-centre projects cost to build. It also strengthens the case, often made in Islamabad, for cheaper surplus grid power to attract data-centre investment.

The bubble warning

Dimon's own caveat matters. He has said plainly that a chunk of AI capital spending will be lost, the way it was in past technology booms. For Pakistani investors watching US-listed tech and the KSE-100 technology names, that is the risk on the other side of the story: valuations are priced for the trillion-dollar case, and any pullback in that spending hits sentiment fast.

The short version: the AI money is real and rising, Pakistan can win a slice of the services work, but the same forecast that promises contracts also carries a warning about how much of that spending pays off.