"But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you." Matthew 6:33.
What would you call a business that spends Sh30 for every Sh1 it earns and calls it a strategy? In any other boardroom, you would call it a crisis.
In 2026, you call it the Artificial Intelligence (AI) race. AI represents a sweeping global modernisation that mimics historic economic eras, like the Industrial Revolution, on steroids, operating at hyper-speed.
Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Meta are spending close to Sh94 trillion on AI infrastructure this year alone. That is nearly 30 times the roughly Sh3.2 trillion these companies generated in AI service revenue in 2025.
Since 2020, big tech AI infrastructure spending has crossed Sh194 trillion.
McKinsey projects global data centre spending could reach Sh906 trillion by 2030. Yet only 39 per cent of organisations report any measurable financial impact from AI, per McKinsey's own 2025 global survey.
The world's most sophisticated capital is spending at a pace that would bankrupt most nations, for returns most businesses would find embarrassing. Almost nobody in that race is pausing to ask why.
This week's signal
The world is in a frenzy and history already knows what comes next. Economist Carlota Perez spent decades mapping how major technological revolutions behave.
Her conclusion holds across canals, railways, electricity and the internet. They follow the same sequence. An installation period of irruption and frenzy.
A turning point triggered by financial correction. Then a deployment period where the technology's real value is finally harvested by society at large.
The frenzy phase has identifiable features, and they are all visible in 2026. Irrational capital deployment far exceeding demand. Extreme new wealth, with the world's first trillionaire emerging this year on the back of the AI boom. Ethics weakened, regulation absent.
Creative destruction dismantling professional structures faster than replacements can emerge.
The junior analyst, the graduate trainee, the entry-level lawyer, all disrupted before their professions built new pathways for what was taken from them.
The historical parallel is precise. The railway boom of the 1840s laid more track than demand justified. The fibre-optic boom of the late 1990s buried enough cable to circle the Earth hundreds of times, most of it dark for a decade. Both bubbles corrected. The infrastructure remained and powered the next fifty years of growth.
What it means for business
The insight is not that the bubble will burst. It is that the bubble is the mechanism. The nearly Sh94 trillion spent on AI infrastructure in 2026 alone is the foundation that makes AI genuinely transformative by 2035 and 2040. Nobody remembers the railway companies that went bankrupt in the 1840s. Everyone benefits from the network they left behind.
For Kenyan and African business leaders, the question is not whether to invest in AI. It is whether to build AI infrastructure or build on top of it. The companies that win after every turning point rarely led the frenzy.
They understood what the frenzy was laying down and moved early.
M-Pesa did not build the mobile network. It understood what the network made possible and moved before anyone else did. That is foresight leadership.
What it means for policy
The frenzy phase is historically when regulation is weakest and ethics lowest. Copyright disputes over AI training data, unresolved data sovereignty questions, and absent frameworks for autonomous systems are all frenzy phase symptoms.
African governments watching from outside have one clear opportunity. Not to regulate the frenzy. But to build governance architecture that positions African nations for the deployment period, when AI value is finally distributed rather than concentrated at the top.
What it means for people
The most dangerous moment in any technological revolution is not the crash. It is the gap between crash and deployment. Old structures destroyed. New ones not yet built, graduates trained for jobs that no longer exist and communities connected to data centres they do not own. The organisations and governments that prepare for that transition window will define who benefits from the AI era, and who watches from outside it.
Afterthought
Matthew 6:33 does not say ignore revenue. It says seek the right thing first and everything else follows. The organisations spending Sh30 on infrastructure for every Sh1 of AI revenue are making a civilisational bet that what they build now will define the next fifty years.
Some will be right; most of the money will be lost. But the infrastructure will remain.
Seek the purpose first, and the returns follow. “Decisions are made on the radar screen, but the future is yours”.
The writer is a human-centred strategist and leadership columnist