A curious thing happened in the tech world a few days ago. Microsoft investors wanted to know when they'd see a hard return on artificial intelligence. Their concern increased, likely with each of the three times the phrase "and beyond" appeared during the latest earnings call, as made available by The Motley Fool:

• "Capital expenditures, including finance leases, were $19 billion, in line with expectations and cash paid for PP&E was $13.9 billion. cloud and AI-related spend represents nearly all of our total capital expenditures," said chief financial officer Amy Hood. "Within that, roughly half is for infrastructure needs where we continue to build and lease data centers that will support monetization over the next 15 years and beyond."
• "Being able to maybe share a little more about that when we talked about roughly half of FY '24′s total capital expense, as well as half of Q4′s expense, it's really on land and build and finance leases, and those things really will be monetized over 15 years and beyond," said Hood.

As Business Insider and others have reported, investors had wanted to know when the payback on artificial intelligence would happen. They apparently didn't like the answers — the repetition of "15 years and beyond."

The reason for that long period is that developing and building the data center and networking infrastructure to make AI work as vendors hope will happen is expensive and time-consuming. Longer timelines in CRE aren't unusual. The tech industry typically expects faster developments and higher projected profits.

This is a warning sign for commercial real estate in two ways. Doing business with tech, and building data centers that computer companies will lease, may not be as certain a path to future profits as has been expected.