Sometimes, it can seem like the AI industry is racing to see who can spend the most money on data centers. The prevailing thinking suggests that whoever builds the most data centers will have the most computing power, and thus be able to build the best AI products, which will guarantee victory in the years to come. There are limits to this logic, as traditional businesses eventually succeed by making more money and spending less, but it has proven remarkably persuasive for large tech companies.
If that is the game, Amazon does seem to be winning. The company announced in its earnings that it projects 200 billion dollars in capital expenditures throughout 2026, across AI, chips, robotics, and low earth orbit satellites. That is up from the 131.8 billion dollars in capital expenditures in 2025. It is tempting to attribute the whole budget to AI, but unlike most of its competitors, Amazon has a significant physical plant, some of which is being converted for use by expensive robots, so the non-AI expenses are not so easy to wave away.
Google is close behind. In its earnings, the company projected between 175 billion and 185 billion dollars in capital expenditures for 2026, up from 91.4 billion dollars the previous year. It is significantly more than the company spent on fixed assets last year, and significantly more than most of its competitors are spending.
Meta projected 115 to 135 billion dollars in capital expenditure spending for 2026, while Oracle, once the poster child for AI infrastructure, projects a comparatively modest 50 billion dollars. Microsoft does not have an official projection for 2026 yet, but the most recent quarterly figure was 37.5 billion dollars, which pencils out to roughly 150 billion dollars annually if sustained. This is a notable increase that has led to investor pressure on CEO Satya Nadella, but it still puts the company in third place.
From within the tech world, the logic is simple. The revolutionary potential of AI is going to turn high-end compute into the scarce resource of the future, and only companies that control their own supply will survive. But while Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Oracle and others are frantically preparing for this compute-driven future, their investors are not convinced. Each company saw its stock price plummet as investors balked at the hundreds of billions of dollars being committed, and companies with higher spends tended to drop more.
Crucially, this is not just a problem for companies that have not figured out their AI product strategy yet. It is a problem for everyone, even companies like Microsoft and Amazon with a robust cloud business and a straightforward plan for how to make money in the AI era. The numbers are simply too high for investor comfort.
Investor sentiment is not everything, and in this case, it may not do much to change the industry’s mind. If you believe AI is about to change everything, and the argument is pretty compelling at this point, you would be a fool to change course just because Wall Street got jumpy. But going forward, big tech companies will be under a lot of pressure to downplay how expensive their AI ambitions really are.