Read more at:
Every quarter, I look at the capital expenditure numbers coming out of the major cloud providers, and every quarter, they manage to surprise me. This time, though, we’ve crossed into territory that’s genuinely hard to process. The five biggest US cloud and AI infrastructure providers (Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Oracle) have collectively committed to spending between $660 billion and $690 billion on capex in 2026, nearly doubling what they spent just a year ago.
Amazon leads the pack with a projected $200 billion, most of it directed at data centers and AI compute. Alphabet has committed $175 to $185 billion, up from $91 billion in 2025. Microsoft is tracking toward $120 billion or more, having already spent $37.5 billion in a single quarter. Meta is at $115 to $135 billion, and Oracle is targeting roughly $50 billion. For context, four companies alone plan to invest about $630 billion, a 62% increase from the record $388 billion they spent in 2025.
What are they buying? Mostly chips, buildings, and electricity. The spending splits across the AI data center stack: GPUs and custom accelerators such as Google’s Tensor Processing Units and Amazon’s Trainium, the physical data centers themselves with their liquid cooling and high-density floors, and often the power infrastructure to run it all, including power purchase agreements and even on-site gas-fired generation where the grid can’t keep up. Roughly two-thirds of the money goes to compute, and one-third goes to facilities, power, cooling, and networking, with the power share rising every quarter.
