How the Big Tech companies are spending their huge capex budgets
It’s mostly, but not all, for AI.
Despite setting records for capital expenditure in 2025, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet are ratcheting up capex again this year, with analysts expecting an increase of 50% to a total of more than $600 billion in 2026. Microsoft didn’t give formal guidance, so it’s possible its spending this year, like its peers, will ultimately exceed analysts’ expectations.
Tesla, which typically spends far less than Big Tech companies, plans to more than double its capex this year.
Apple is a bit of an odd man out, considering its capex declined last quarter, but even its spending on property and equipment is slated to rise.
Where’s all this money going? Mostly to AI data centers — but not exclusively. We dug through Big Tech companies’ latest earnings calls to see how they describe these hundreds of billions in their own words.
Alphabet
2025 capex: $91.4 billion
2026 capex guidance: $175 billion to $185 billion
Where it’s going: “The vast majority of our CapEx [in 2025] was invested in technical infrastructure, with approximately 60% of that investment in servers and 40% in data centers and networking equipment... [In 2026,] we’re investing in AI compute capacity to support frontier model development by Google DeepMind, ongoing efforts to improve the user experience and drive higher advertiser ROI in Google Services, significant cloud customer demand as well as strategic investments in Other Bets.”
Tesla
2025 capex: $8.5 billion
2026 capex guidance: Over $20 billion
Where it’s going: “We’ll be paying for six factories, namely the refinery, LFP factories, Cybercab, Semi, a new Megafactory, the Optimus factory. On top of it, we’ll also be spending money for building our AI compute infrastructure, and we’ll continue investing in our existing factories to build more capacity.
“And then also, the related infrastructure along with it. And we’ll also further expand our fleet of Robotaxi and Optimus. While this may seem a lot, we believe this is the right strategy to position the company for the next era and we’ll make such investments, as Elon mentioned, in a very capital-efficient manner. Note that this does not include potential investments in solar cell manufacturing or our TeraFab as we’re still in early phase.”
Analysts at Deutsche Bank broke down the investments even further in their own back-of-the-envelope calculations:
Meta
2025 capex: $72 billion
2026 capex guidance: $115 billion to $135 billion
Where it’s going: Last quarter capex was “driven by investments in data centers, servers and network infrastructure.”
In the future, “we will continue to invest very significantly in infrastructure to train leading models and deliver personal superintelligence to billions of people and businesses around the world... An important part of Meta Compute will be making long-term investments in silicon and energy.”
Amazon
2025 capex: $131.8 billion
2026 capex guidance: $200 billion
Where it’s going: “It’s predominantly in AWS and some of it is for our core workloads, which are non-AI workloads because they’re growing at a faster rate than we anticipated. But most of it is in AI, and we just have a lot of growth and a lot of demand.
“Looking ahead, we see further opportunity to enhance productivity in our global fulfillment network, while delivering at faster speeds for customers. We’ll continue optimizing inventory placement to drive down distance traveled, reduce touches per package, and improve package consolidation, as well as launch robotics and automation to increase efficiency and elevate the customer experience.
“We also plan to open more than 100 new Whole Foods Market stores over the next few years.”
Microsoft
2025 calendar year capex: $83 billion
2026 calendar year capex estimate: $116 billion (FactSet’s analyst forecast, since Microsoft doesn’t forecast capex)
Where it’s going: “This quarter, roughly two-thirds of our CapEx was on short-lived assets, primarily GPUs and CPUs. Our customer demand continues to exceed our supply. Therefore, we must balance the need to have our incoming supply better meet growing Azure demand with expanding first-party AI usage across services like M365 Copilot and GitHub Copilot, increasing allocations to R&D teams to accelerate product innovation and continued replacement of end-of-life server and networking equipment.”
Apple
2025 calendar year capex: $12.8 billion
2026 calendar year capex estimate: $13.3 billion (FactSet’s analyst forecast, since Apple doesn’t forecast capex)
Where it’s going: “Our CapEx is made of several different line items that include tooling, our facilities, retail investments — or investments in our retail store, data centers. And on tooling and data centers, we leverage this hybrid model that I mentioned before, which we leverage a combination of first and third-party capacity.”
