Big Tech capex doesn’t seem to be slowing down

Despite economic uncertainty, Big Tech is still spending big on capital expenditures. Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Meta combined spent about $72 billion on purchases of property and equipment last quarter. That’s down slightly from a quarter earlier but still up big year over year, according to data from FactSet, which tracks purchases of property and equipment but not leases.

Here’s what the companies had to say on their latest earnings calls regarding those big bills toward data centers and AI, which they are hoping will pay off in spades later.

Amazon:

Amazon is on track for full-year spending of $100 billion on capex, laying out about $25 billion last quarter alone.

“The majority of this spend is to support the growing need for technology infrastructure. It primarily relates to AWS as we invest to support demand for our AI services and increasingly in custom silicon like Trainium as well as tech infrastructure to support our North America and International segments,” CFO Brian T. Olsavsky said.

Google/Alphabet:

Google’s $17.2 billion in Q1 capex went primarily to “investment in our technical infrastructure with the largest component being investment in servers, followed by data centers to support the growth of our business across Google Services, Google Cloud and Google DeepMind,” according to CFO Anat Ashkenazi.

The company reiterated plans to spend about $75 billion this year on capex, up from $50 billion last year.

“We’re looking at how do we make sure every dollar is used efficiently. We have a highly rigorous process, to determine the demand behind it and then the allocation of the compute associated with our technical infrastructure investments, ensuring that we’re utilizing that appropriately and that we’re highly efficient with everything we’re doing,” Ashkenazi said.

Microsoft:

Earlier this year Microsoft said it would spend $80 billion to “build out AI-enabled datacenters to train AI models and deploy AI and cloud-based applications around the world.” In its latest earnings call, the company said that plan is still on track, despite reports that the company is pulling back on data center construction.

“We continue to expand our data center capacity. This quarter alone, we opened DCs in 10 countries across four continents. Model capabilities are doubling in performance every six months, thanks to multiple compounding scaling laws,” CEO Satya Nadella said. “The reality is we’ve always been making adjustments to build, lease, what pace we build all through the last whatever 10, 15 years. It’s just that you all pay a lot more attention to what we do quarter over quarter nowadays.”

Meta:

The social media giant is actually raising its already mammoth 2025 capex spending estimates to $64 billion to $72 billion (from a previous estimate of $60 billion to $65 billion), in part to account for more data centers but also for higher prices for equipment due to tariffs.

“We expect this significant infrastructure footprint we are building will not only help us meet the demands of our business in the near term, but also provide us an advantage in the quality and scale of AI services we can deliver,” CFO Susan Li said during the earnings call. “The higher costs we expect to incur for infrastructure hardware this year really comes from suppliers who source from countries around the world. And there’s just a lot of uncertainty around this, given the ongoing trade discussions.”