How much Big Tech companies — Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta — are spending on capex this year

Earlier this month, Microsoft announced it would be spending $80 billion this year “to build out AI-enabled datacenters to train AI models and deploy AI and cloud-based applications around the world.” On Friday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said its capital expenditures would climb to $60 billion to $65 billion in 2025 as it erects a city-sized AI data center. “This will be a defining year for AI,” he said.

Thanks largely to AI investments, Microsoft, Meta, Google, and Amazon’sAWS will spend a whopping record $270 billion on capex this year, Goldman Sachs estimates (FactSet consensus numbers are roughly similar), and even more the year after. For context, that’s about 27 Tesla Gigafactories’ worth of capex, assuming they’re about $10 billion apiece. Or, to put it another way, that capex is more than the market cap of about 95% of the companies in the S&P 500. If it were a company, it would be around a Wells Fargo, a systemically important financial institution, or Coca-Cola, an arguably more important American institution.

Of course, news about China’s DeepSeek, an AI model that’s supposed to go toe to toe with those of American tech companies but at an alleged fraction of the cost, could certainly affect these companies’ capex plans going forward. It certainly took a huge dig at some of their stock prices earlier this week.

However, we think that rather than causing them to abruptly shift capex plans, they’ll just have to make their outlay case a little harder.

Depending where we are in the AI hype cycle, spending on AI infrastructure is either an asset (they own the roads to the future!) or a liability (you might remember last year when investors started to get antsy about ROI). Then, Microsoft said its returns were being hampered by a lack of data center capacity. Now, DeepSeek AI appears to have undercut the argument for spending billions more on chips for AI purposes.

It probably won’t be long until the market is back saying that more is in fact more. Already boosters have become experts on Jevons Paradox, the idea that efficiencies create more demand, not less.

“We expect the announcements from DeepSeek to reignite investor debates surrounding the sustainability and return profile of the AI-related investments of META, GOOGL and AMZN,” Goldman Sachs wrote in a research note earlier this week. “On net, we do not expect companies to present significant shifts in their capital allocation priorities around AI on the back of recent events (unlikely to see significant updates to CapEx plans and/or go-to-market strategy).”

Correction: A previous version of this article noted the capex was for Amazon, when it should have been for Amazon’s AWS.