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Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta have told investors they will spend at least $720 billion on capital expenditures this year, mostly on AI data centers, even as AI's promised returns remain largely unrealized.

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**Big Tech** — Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta — told investors they plan at least $720 billion in capital expenditures this year, mostly for AI infrastructure, on top of at least $1 trillion in commitments arranged for coming years, and will not slow on their own; Amazon posted its fastest growth in five years and Google Cloud revenue more than doubled year over year.

What is a key fact in this story? (2)

**Alphabet** plans to spend between $195 billion and $205 billion in capital expenditures this year and will increase spending "significantly" in 2027, CFO Anat Ashkenazi said.

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Big Tech’s big AI buildout will not end until someone stops it — SkimNews

By The Verge AI · Summarized & edited by Kapil Samant · 2026-11-05

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Big Tech — Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta — told investors they plan at least $720 billion in capital expenditures this year, mostly for AI infrastructure, on top of at least $1 trillion in commitments arranged for coming years, and will not slow on their own; Amazon posted its fastest growth in five years and Google Cloud revenue more than doubled year over year.
Alphabet plans to spend between $195 billion and $205 billion in capital expenditures this year and will increase spending "significantly" in 2027, CFO Anat Ashkenazi said.
Amazon intends to spend $220 billion on capital expenditures this year and "meaningfully more" in 2027, CEO Andy Jassy said, calling the largest spending in company history a "once in a lifetime opportunity" to grow Amazon into a $1 trillion company.
Alphabet acknowledged that lower monetization of AI Mode is eating into its core business: Search ad revenue grew 12% in the third quarter, down from 17% a year earlier, and senior vice president Philipp Schindler cited "promising results" from ad experiments without offering specifics; the stock posted its worst one-day drop in history, sinking 13%.
Meta expects to spend between $135 billion and $145 billion this year, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the agentic AI program Muse becomes profitable only if compute costs fall, expecting compute efficiency to improve tenfold next year at significant investment.
Anthropic reported third-quarter revenue of $17 billion, more than 1,000% above a year earlier, against $17.5 billion in compute costs, and has committed nearly $900 billion to future compute and infrastructure including its own data centers — some of it buying Google TPU chips even as Google says it is capacity-constrained.
Microsoft reported $45.2 billion in quarterly capital expenditures, below the $50 billion expected, due to "third party capacity delays," then launched a $25 billion, 10-part bond sale, its first debt funding for the AI buildout.

Why it matters: Alphabet's AI Mode is eating into the Search business that gave investors confidence in the AI spending agenda: Search ad growth slowed to 12% from 17%, and the stock fell 13% in a day, its worst ever. With Microsoft issuing a $25 billion bond and Anthropic's compute costs exceeding revenue, funding is shifting before returns arrive.