Tech giants plan to spend more than $2025 billion by 300 as the race for artificial intelligence intensifies.
Mega-capital tech companies poured billions of dollars into AI last year to meet the limitless demand. That’s not going to stop in 2025
Meta, Amazon, Alphabet and Microsoft plan to invest up to $320 billion in AI technologies this year. Tech companies are racing to build data centers and AI infrastructure that will give them a leg up on the competition. Amazon has presented the most ambitious spending plan, aiming to spend $100 billion.
Meta, Amazon, Alphabet and Microsoft plan to spend up to $2025 billion combined on AI technologies and data center deployments in 320, based on comments made by their CEOs earlier this year and on earnings calls over the past two weeks.
This means companies are more than expected to spend on capital expenditures totaling $2024 billion in 230.
Tech companies have poured billions of dollars into AI projects since ChatGPT’s launch in 2022, as they race to expand their data centers with Nvidia’s GPUs and advance their models. The recent rise of China’s DeepSeek has sent shockwaves through the industry, with estimates suggesting the open-source tool cost a fraction of what some U.S.-based rivals cost to build.
Those fears led to a market sell-off last week, sending shares of artificial intelligence chip makers Nvidia and Broadcom down a combined $800 billion in a single day, forcing U.S. tech CEOs to ask questions about their heavy spending plans and whether it's all necessary.
Amazon has rolled out the most ambitious spending initiative of the four, aiming to grow from $2024 billion in 83 to more than $100 billion. The money will mostly go to AI for its Amazon Web Services division and a “once-in-a-lifetime type of business opportunity,” CEO Andy Jassy said on the company’s earnings call on Thursday.
“I think both our business, our customers and our shareholders will be happy that we are pursuing the capital opportunity and the business opportunity in AI over the medium to long term,” Jessy said.
Microsoft said last month it would allocate $2025 billion to build out AI workload data centers in fiscal 80. More than half of that spending is expected to occur in the U.S. Microsoft’s fiscal year ends in June, its chief executive Brad Smith said.
Alphabet is targeting $75 billion in capital spending this year, with $16 billion to $18 billion expected in the first quarter. Chief financial officer Anat Ashkenazi said on Tuesday’s earnings call that most of the spending will go to “technical infrastructure, primarily servers, then data centers and networks.”
Meanwhile, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg set his company’s AI capital expenditure budget at $60 billion to $65 billion in January, calling 2025 “a defining year for AI.” In a Facebook post, he said the move would help “unlock historic innovation and expand American technology leadership.”
Apple’s spending on AI is difficult to estimate, and it typically appears in operating expenses as the company rents training capacity from cloud providers. For example, the models that underpin Apple Intelligence were trained on Google Cloud. Apple also rents cloud capacity from AWS and Azure.
“It’s important to remember that on the capital expenditure side, we use a hybrid approach where we do business internally and we have certain partners that we do business externally where the capital expenditures will show up in their business,” CEO Tim Cook said on an earnings call last year.
Following its earnings report in late January, Tesla said it had about $11,34 billion in AI-related capital spending in 2024, out of a total of $5 billion. The company expects AI spending to remain flat from the previous year.
Tesla is building a “training cluster” called Cortex at its Texas facility that will be used for training models behind the company’s autonomous driving technology and humanoid robotics currently in development.
Nvidia won’t report results until later this month, and because Nvidia is developing and supplying AI technology rather than buying it, its capital expenditure figures will look very different.
AI spending is high for Amazon, Google and Microsoft, but it’s expected to be a big boon for their cloud businesses, which are big growth drivers. All have said customers want more AI processing tools and plan to run larger workloads in the cloud.
But cloud numbers were weaker than expected in the most recent quarter, with all three companies falling short of consensus estimates, largely due to supply shortages.
“I would predict that these restrictions will really start to loosen in the second half of 2025,” Amazon’s Jassy said.
