The AI Gold Rush: Investment Rockets as Tech Firms Race to Outspend Each Other

Investment rockets as tech firms race to outspend each other

- Blake Montgomery

The US's largest companies have spent 2025 locked in a competition to spend more money than one another, lavishing $155 billion (£117 billion) 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 (capex), a figure that refers to the money companies spend to acquire or upgrade tangible assets, already totals tens of billions.

Capex 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."