The Globe and Mail reports in its Tuesday edition that for nearly three decades, Big Tech enjoyed an ideal business model: develop software, distribute it globally at low costs and see profit margins grow. The Globe's guest columnist Mehmet Beceren writes that the rise of artificial intelligence, however, is transforming Big Tech into a capital-intensive industry. AI models need substantial infrastructure, such as data centres. This shift brings distinct economic challenges, including high upfront costs, ongoing maintenance and sunk capital that is hard to recover. This is where the earnings quality question enters the picture. The issue is not that the earnings are fake. That is not the point. The point is that reported earnings now depend heavily on accounting assumptions related to depreciation, an issue no longer buried in footnotes. It came up in the latest earnings calls last week. Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft spent a combined $130-billion (U.S.) on capex, or capital expenditures, in the first quarter alone. Their combined capex plans are tracking toward roughly $750-billion (U.S.) just this year. That is not normal corporate spending. That is major industrial build-out dressed up as a technology story.