Big Tech to spend $650 bn this year as AI race intensifies

Four of the biggest US technology companies together have forecast capital expenditures that will reach about $650 billion in 2026 - a mind-boggling tide of cash earmarked for new data centers and the long list of equipment needed to make them tick, including artificial intelligence chips, networking cables and backup generators.

- Bloomberg

The spending planned by Alphabet Inc., Amazon.com Inc., Meta Platforms Inc. and Microsoft Corp., all in pursuit of dominance in the still-nas-

cent market for AI tools, is a boom without a parallel this century.

Each of the companies' estimated outlay for this year would set a high-water mark for capital spending by any single corporation in any one of the past 10 years, according to Bloomberg data.

The search for a comparison to the high-flying spending projections - which came as the four reported earnings in the past two weeks - requires going back at least as far as the telecommunications bubble of the 1990s, and perhaps to the build-out of the US railroad

LAST WEEK, META SAID FULL-YEAR CAPEX WILL RISE TO AS MUCH AS $135 BILLION - A POTENTIAL JUMP OF ABOUT 87%