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Another Big Tech earnings week has wrapped.
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It gave us fresh signs of what major players in the AI space are willing to spend to get ahead.
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Here’s a look at which Big Tech companies look more cautious and which look more bullish on AI spending.
A slew of Big Tech companies reported quarterly earnings this week, and with those earnings, some progress reports on the tens of billions of dollars they’re funneling into AI.
Some Big Tech companies are showing signs of reining in AI spending while others are plowing full steam ahead.
Cumulatively, Meta, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Amazon plan to spend more than $300 billion this year, much of which will be on AI. Apple has also said it plans to spend $500 billion over the next four years.
Here’s a look at where some of the biggest players stand:
Google parent company Alphabet estimates $75 billion in capital expenditures for 2025, largely for data centers and server capacity for AI. This is well above the consensus estimate of $57.9 billion and represents an increase of about 43% year-over-year.
“We are confident about the opportunities ahead, and to accelerate our progress, we expect to invest approximately $75 billion in capital expenditures in 2025,” CEO Sundar Pichai said in a February earnings release.
“We expect to increase our investments in capital expenditure for technical infrastructure, primarily for servers, followed by data centers and networking,” CFO Anat Ashkenazi said during the company’s earnings call that month.
First-quarter capex was $17.2 billion for the company, which is breaking ground for several new data centers to support its AI work, including Google Search AI overview and the Gemini chatbot.
Amazon
Amazon previously said it expects increased capital expenditures this year of $100 billion, largely for AI, particularly for the company’s AWS cloud computing division.
In Amazon’s Q1 earnings Thursday, the company reported capex of $24.3 billion, up more than 70% year-over-year.
CEO Andy Jassy added AWS has seen an “explosion of coding agents.”
Jassy said on a third-quarter earnings call last year that the massive investment was justified because AI is “a really unusually large, maybe once-in-a-lifetime type of opportunity.”
“I think that both our business, our customers and shareholders will be happy, medium to long-term, that we’re pursuing the capital opportunity and the business opportunity in AI,” he said.
Meta
In its recent Q1 earnings, Meta raised its full-year capex estimate from a range of $60 to $65 billion to $64 to $72 billion now.
The change “reflects additional data center investments to support our artificial intelligence efforts as well as an increase in the expected cost of infrastructure hardware,” the company said in its earnings report.
This is a marked increase from the company’s 2024 capex of $39.23 billion.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg kicked off his remarks in Meta’s Q1 earnings call by talking about AI being “the major theme” at Meta right now that’s “transforming everything we do.”
Zuckerberg noted these are “long-term investments that are downstream from us,” but said the company “will be wildly happy with the investments that we are making.”
Microsoft
Microsoft is showing signs it may not remain as bullish on AI spending as some of its peers.
CFO Amy Hood said on the Q1 earnings call Wednesday that the company expects capex to grow in the coming fiscal year, but noted, “it will grow at a lower rate than FY 2025 and will include a greater mix of short lived assets, which are more directly correlated to revenue than long lived assets.”
The company has said before that it expects capex of $80 billion in fiscal year 2025 in order to “build out AI-enabled datacenters to train AI models and deploy AI and cloud-based applications around the world.” More than half of the investment will be in the US.
Earlier this month, Noelle Walsh, the head of Microsoft cloud operations, said the company “may strategically pace our plans.”
“In recent years, demand for our cloud and AI services grew more than we could have ever anticipated and to meet this opportunity, we began executing the largest and most ambitious infrastructure scaling project in our history,” she wrote in a LinkedIn post.
“By nature, any significant new endeavor at this size and scale requires agility and refinement as we learn and grow with our customers. What this means is that we are slowing or pausing some early-stage projects,” she continued.
Apple
On February, Apple announced its biggest spend commitment in the company’s history, for $500 billion in the US over four years toward AI initiatives, manufacturing, and silicon engineering, among other expenses.
“We’re going to be expanding our teams and our facilities in several states, including Michigan, Texas, California, Arizona, Nevada, Iowa, Oregon, North Carolina, and Washington,” CEO Tim Cook said in the company’s Q1 earnings call Thursday. “And we’re going to be opening a new factory for advanced server manufacturing in Texas.”
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