Big Tech's AI Arms Race: $344 Billion Spending Spree in 2025

Big Tech's Big Bet on AI Driving $344 Billion in Spend This Year

If there's any lesson to take from the spending plans issued by the world's largest technology companies over the past two weeks, it's to never underestimate the fear of missing out. Microsoft Corp., which set a $24.2 billion capital spending record last quarter, plans to drop upwards of $30 billion in the current period. Amazon.com Inc. similarly spent $31.4 billion last quarter, almost double what it dropped a year ago, and is maintaining that level of investment. Google owner Alphabet Inc. raised its capital expenditures guidance this year to $85 billion.

Big tech has spent $155bn on AI this year. It's about to spend hundreds of billions more

Tech giants have spent more on AI than the US government has on education, jobs and social services in 2025 so far The US's largest companies have spent 2025 locked in a competition to spend more money than one another, lavishing $155bn on the development of artificial intelligence, more than the US government has spent on education, training, employment and social services in the 2025 fiscal year so far. Based on the most recent financial disclosures of Silicon Valley's biggest players, the race is about to accelerate to hundreds of billions in a single year. Over the past two weeks, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet, Google's parent, have shared their quarterly public financial reports. Each disclosed that their year-to-date capital expenditure, a figure that refers to the money companies spend to acquire or upgrade tangible assets, already totals tens of billions. Capex, as the term is abbreviated, is a proxy for technology companies' spending on AI because the technology requires gargantuan investments in physical infrastructure, namely data centers, which require large amounts of power, water and expensive semiconductor chips. Google said during its most recent earnings call that its capital expenditure "primarily reflects investments in servers and data centers to support AI". Meta's year-to-date capital expenditure amounted to $30.7bn, doubling the $15.2bn figure from the same time last year, per its earnings report. For the most recent quarter alone, the company spent $17bn on capital expenditures, also double the same period in 2024, $8.5bn. Alphabet reported nearly $40bn in capex to date for the first two quarters of the current fiscal year, and Amazon reported $55.7bn. Microsoft said it would spend more than $30bn in the current quarter to build out the data centers powering its AI services. Microsoft CFO Amy Hood said the current quarter's capex would be at least 50% more than the outlay during the same period a year earlier and greater than the company's record capital expenditures of $24.2bn in the quarter to June. "We will continue to invest against the expansive opportunity ahead," Hood said. For the coming fiscal year, big tech's total capital expenditure is slated to balloon enormously, surpassing the already eye-popping sums of the previous year. Microsoft plans to unload about $100bn on AI in the next fiscal year, CEO Satya Nadella said Wednesday. Meta plans to spend between $66bn and $72bn. Alphabet plans to spend $85bn, significantly higher than its previous estimation of $75bn. Amazon estimated that its 2025 expenditure would come to $100bn as it plows money into Amazon Web Services, which analysts now expect to amount to $118bn. In total, the four tech companies will spend more than $400bn on capex in the coming year, according to the Wall Street Journal. The multibillion-dollar figures represent mammoth investments, which the Journal points out is larger than the European Union's quarterly spending on defense. However, the tech giants can't seem to spend enough for their investors. Microsoft, Google and Meta informed Wall Street analysts last quarter that their total capex would be higher than previously estimated. In the case of all three companies, investors were thrilled, and shares in each company soared after their respective earnings calls. Microsoft's market capitalization hit $4tn the day after its report. Even Apple, the cagiest of the tech giants, signaled that it would boost its spending on AI in the coming year by a major amount, either via internal investments or acquisitions. The company's quarterly capex rose to $3.46bn, up from $2.15bn during the same period last year. The iPhone maker reported blockbuster earnings Thursday, with rebounding iPhone sales and better-than-expected business in China, but it is still seen as lagging farthest behind on development and deployment of AI products among the tech giants. Tim Cook, Apple's CEO, said Thursday that the company was reallocating a "fair number" of employees to focus on artificial intelligence and that the "heart of our AI strategy" is to increase investments and "embed" AI across all of its devices and platforms. Cook refrained from disclosing exactly how much Apple is spending, however. "We are significantly growing our investment, I'm not putting specific numbers behind that," he said. Smaller players are trying to keep up with the incumbents' massive spending and capitalize on the gold rush. OpenAI announced at the end of the week of earnings that it had raised $8.3bn in investment, part of a planned $40bn round of funding, valuing the startup, whose ChatGPT chatbot kicked in 2022, at $300bn.

The AI race has Big Tech spending $344 billion this year

If there's any lesson to take from the spending plans issued by the world's largest technology companies over the past two weeks, it's to never underestimate the fear of missing out. Microsoft, which set a $24.2 billion capital spending record last quarter, plans to drop upward of $30 billion in the current period. Amazon.com similarly spent $31.4 billion last quarter, almost double what it dropped a year ago, and is maintaining that level of investment. Google owner Alphabet raised its capital expenditures guidance this year to $85 billion. Then there's Meta Platforms: The social networking giant lifted the low end of its forecast for 2025 capital expenditures and projected that costs will continue to grow at an even faster pace next year. Altogether, the four companies are expected to spend more than $344 billion for the year, with much of it going to the data centers necessary to run AI models.