Strip away the earnings-call poetry and the story of the AI boom is plainer than its boosters admit. The most advanced technology of our time is being used, first and foremost, to sell more ads.
Meta says 98% of its revenue comes from advertising. Nearly 10 million advertisers used its AI tools last quarter. Google is wiring Gemini through its ad systems. The billions poured into chips, data centers and "superintelligence" are not primarily curing disease or raising wages. They are making the surveillance-and-persuasion machine more efficient. Silicon Valley has spent two years promising a new industrial revolution. The quarterly numbers show a very profitable upgrade to the old business model.
Look at the figure Meta chose to brag about. Advertisers using its AI assistant saw conversions rise nearly 5% and spending rise 9%. If those numbers describe the same advertisers, they spent nearly twice as much more as they gained in results. Meta calls that success, and for Meta it is. A dentist in Ohio or a clothing shop in Atlanta is not a beneficiary of this system so much as a captive customer. They cannot leave, because that is where the audience is. Automated tools now decide whom their money reaches, with less visibility than ever into why. When a platform controls the audience, the auction, the targeting and the measurement, "AI-optimized" can quietly mean "priced to extract."
The defense is predictable: ads fund free services, small businesses reach customers they never could have found, and better targeting is better matching. Some of that is true. But it's an argument for a competitive ad market, which is exactly what we do not have. Federal courts have found Google illegally maintained monopolies in search and in ad tech. Meta is a dominant force built partly by buying rivals. Two companies take an outsized share of digital advertising dollars, and they are now using their pile of cash to build AI infrastructure few competitors can match. Google Cloud nearly doubling its revenue on custom chips and infrastructure demand shows the moat widening, not narrowing. Monopoly profits are being converted into a monopoly on the next technology.
And the bill doesn't arrive only at advertisers. These models are trained on the work of writers, artists, publishers and ordinary users who were never asked and never paid. The data centers need enormous amounts of power, and in too many places the cost is passed through to ordinary ratepayers while the tax breaks flow to the builders. Teenagers who were already the product in the social media era are now being served by systems tuned with even greater precision to hold their attention. Everyone is told the gains are shared. The costs are concrete and local; the profits are global and private.
The Left should not respond with nostalgia or technophobia. AI can be useful, and a left worth the name wants its benefits widely held. But that requires saying plainly what these earnings show: the market is not distributing the gains fairly on its own, and Democrats have too often acted as though a friendly relationship with the industry's executives was a substitute for law. Where is the federal privacy statute? Where is the ad-tech structural remedy with teeth? Where are the rules making data centers pay their own way on power and water, and the licensing regime that compensates the people whose work feeds the models?
Every strong quarter makes these companies harder to regulate, because the revenue buys lobbyists, lawyers and political goodwill. The time to set terms is while the technology is still being built, not after it is as entrenched as the ad duopoly it is currently enriching. Wall Street is celebrating a more efficient toll booth. The public should ask who owns the road.
How it may affect me
If you run ads on Google or Meta, expect AI-driven tools to be pushed as defaults, and watch your cost per sale, not just clicks or spend. As a consumer, these upgrades usually mean more detailed use of your data for targeting. Data center growth can also affect local electricity rates, so check utility commission proceedings in your area.
