Tech giants Alphabet (GOOG) (GOOGL), Amazon (AMZN), Microsoft (MSFT) and Meta Platforms (META) are spending billions of dollars to build AI infrastructure, and some have even raised their expectations for the next year as the AI race heats up.
Meta (META)
The Facebook parent expects full year 2025 total expenses to be in the range of $116B to $118B, revised from its prior outlook of $114B to $118B, reflecting a growth rate of 22% to 24% year-over-year. The company expects 2025 capital expenditures, including principal payments on finance leases, to be in the range of $70B to $72B, increased from its prior outlook of $66B to $72B.
Meta said it will “spend aggressively” next year, warning its capital expenditures will be “notably larger” in 2026 and total expenses will grow at a “significantly faster percentage rate.”
“While our progress on AI models and products will position us to capitalize on new revenue opportunities in the years to come. A central requirement to realizing these opportunities is infrastructure capacity,” said CFO Susan Li on the company’s third quarter earnings call.
Li added that the company is still working through its capacity plans for next year, but it expects to invest aggressively to meet these needs, both by building its own infrastructure and contracting with third-party cloud providers.
“We anticipate this will provide further upward pressure on our CapEx and expense plans next year. As a result, our current expectation is that CapEx dollar growth will be notably larger in 2026 than 2025. We also anticipate total expenses will grow at a significantly faster percentage rate than 2025, with growth primarily driven by infrastructure costs, including incremental cloud expenses and depreciation,” Li noted.
The Instagram and WhatsApp owner is planning to raise up to $30B through bond offerings.
Alphabet (GOOG) (GOOGL)
Alphabet raised its forecast for capital expenditure for 2025 and 2026.
“We’re continuing to invest aggressively due to the demand we’re experiencing from Cloud customers as well as the growth opportunities we see across the company. We now expect CapEx to be in the range of $91 billion to $93 billion in 2025, up from our previous estimate of $85 billion,” said Alphabet’s Senior Vice President and CFO Anat Ashkenazi during the third quarter earnings call.
Google had previously indicated $22.4B in capex for the third quarter — it came in at just under $24B — and analysts had expected full-year capex would come in at just over $84B.
“Looking out to 2026, we expect a significant increase in CapEx,” said Ashkenazi adding that the company will provide more detail on its fourth quarter earnings call.
Ashkenazi noted that in terms of expenses, as previously mentioned, the “significant increase in our investments in technical infrastructure will continue to put pressure on the P&L” in the form of higher depreciation expenses and related data center operations costs such as energy.
Microsoft (MSFT)
The software giant expects to spend more in fiscal 2026 to grow its business than it previously forecast.
“With accelerating demand and a growing RPO [remaining performance obligation] balance, we’re increasing our spend on GPUs and CPUs. Therefore, total spend will increase sequentially, and we now expect the FY ’26 growth rate to be higher than FY ’25,” said Amy Hood, executive vice president and CFO, on the company’s first quarter fiscal 2026 earnings call.
Hood noted that capital expenditures were $34.9B in the first quarter, driven by growing demand for our Cloud and AI offerings. About half of the spend was on short-lived assets, mainly GPUs and CPUs, to support increasing Azure platform demand, growing first-party apps at AI solutions, accelerating research and development, or R&D, by product teams, and continued replacement for end-of-life server and networking equipment, according to Hood.
“The remaining spend was for long-lived assets that will support monetization for the next 15 years and beyond, including $11.1 billion of finance leases that are primarily for large data center sites. And cash paid for PP&E was $19.4 billion,” Hood added.
Amazon (AMZN)
Amazon said its cash CapEx was $34.2B in the third quarter and the company has spent $89.9B so far this year. The e-commerce giant noted that it will continue to make significant investments, especially in AI.
“This primarily relates to AWS [Amazon Web Services] as we invest to support demand for our AI and core services and in custom silicon, like Trainium as well as tech infrastructure to support our North America and international segments. We’ll continue to make significant investments, especially in AI, as we believe it to be a massive opportunity with the potential for strong returns on invested capital over the long term,” said Brian Olsavsky, Amazon’s senior vice president and CFO on the company’s third quarter earnings call.
Apple (AAPL)
The iPhone maker did not disclose the exact amount for capital expenditure but noted that the company is expecting increases in its CapEx spending related to AI.
In a query related to big tech companies increasing their CapEx in advance of AI demand, Kevan Parekh, Apple (AAPL) senior vice president and CFO, said on the company’s fourth quarter earnings call that “we are expecting increases in our CapEx spending related to AI investments. For example, as I mentioned earlier, we did end up having investments this year to build out our Private Cloud Compute environment. And we do believe this hybrid model has served us very well, and we continue to want to leverage it. And so I don’t see us moving away from this hybrid model where we leverage both first-party capacity as well as leverage third-party capacity.”
Parekh added that the company will continue to want to build out Private Cloud Compute, as it has more usage there over time. “But I think, in general, we want to continue to have this hybrid model,” Parekh noted.