The AI industry can sometimes seem like a competition to see who can spend the most money on data centers. It is believed that whoever builds the most data centers will have the most computing power and therefore be able to build the best AI products, which will guarantee victory in the coming years. This way of thinking has its limits. Traditionally, businesses ultimately succeed by making more money and spending less. But this idea has proven very persuasive to big tech companies.
If it’s a contest, Amazon appears to be winning.
The company announced in its earnings call Thursday that it expects to make $200 billion in capital spending throughout 2026 in “AI, chips, robotics, and low-orbit satellites.” This is up from $131.8 billion in capital spending in 2025. It is tempting to attribute the entire capital investment budget to AI. But unlike most of its competitors, Amazon has a large physical plant, some of which has been modified for use with expensive robots, so non-AI costs can’t be so easily waived.
Google is close behind. In its Wednesday earnings call, the company expected capital spending in 2026 to be between $175 billion and $185 billion, up from $91.4 billion a year earlier. That’s significantly more than the company spent on fixed assets last year, and significantly more than most of its competitors are spending.
Meta, which reported last week, forecasts capital spending in the range of $115 billion to $135 billion in 2026, while Oracle (once the gold standard for AI infrastructure) forecasts just $50 billion. Microsoft doesn’t have official forecasts for 2026 yet, but the latest quarterly figure was $37.5 billion, which, assuming things stay the same, would be around $150 billion. This is a notable increase, leading to investor pressure on CEO Satya Nadella, but it still puts the company in third place.
From within the technology industry, the logic here is simple. The revolutionary potential of AI will transform high-end computing into the future’s scarce resource, and only companies that control their own supply will survive. But while Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Oracle and others are frantically preparing for the computing desert of the future, investors are unconvinced. Stock prices for each company plummeted as investors hesitated to invest hundreds of billions of dollars, and companies that spent more tended to have lower stock prices.
Importantly, this isn’t just a problem for companies like Meta that haven’t yet developed an AI product strategy. That’s everyone, including companies like Microsoft and Amazon that have robust cloud businesses and are thinking openly about how to make money in the age of AI. This number is too high to reassure investors.
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Investor psychology isn’t everything. And in this case, it may not do much to change the industry’s mind. If you believe that AI is going to change everything (and this argument is pretty convincing at this point), you would be a fool to change course just because Wall Street gets excited. But going forward, Big Tech companies will be under intense pressure to downplay how expensive their AI ambitions actually are.
