Big Tech Blows $130B in One Quarter on Capex Alone
Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Amazon set a Q1 capex record with spending projected to surge 77% by 2026.
The four horsemen of Big Tech infrastructure — Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Amazon — collectively dropped a record $130 billion in capital expenditure during Q1. That number is only going up.
Combined capex for the group is projected to hit $725 billion in 2026, a 77% jump from the $410 billion expected in 2025. The AI arms race is draining corporate treasuries at a pace nobody's seen before.
Wall Street's reaction was mixed. Meta's stock took a hit after revealing its capex increase, while Alphabet emerged as the cloud darling — its cloud business is now growing faster than rivals Amazon and Microsoft.
The spending war raises a simple question: when does infrastructure investment start paying off? For now, Big Tech is betting hundreds of billions that the answer is soon.