Big Tech's AI spending spree is going strong. Here's how big it could be this year

In January, Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said the company is planning to invest between $60 billion and $65 billion in capital expenditures on AI this year.

To meet power demands, Zuckerberg said Meta is building a data center with a capacity of more than two gigawatts — a site that could cover a large part of Manhattan. He also said the company plans to “significantly” grow its AI teams, and has “the capital to continue investing in the years ahead.”

In a blog post for the New Year, Microsoft said it is on track to invest $80 billion in AI-enabled data centers in fiscal year 2025, which ends on June 30.

The data centers will be used for training and deploying AI models and cloud-based applications, and more than half of the investment will be focused in the U.S., Microsoft President Brad Smith said.

Alphabet chief executive Sundar Pichai said Google’s AI leadership makes it “confident about the opportunities ahead,” and that the company expects to invest $75 billion in capital expenditures this year “to accelerate our progress,” in a statement about the company’s fourth quarter results.

“Our results show the power of our differentiated full-stack approach to AI innovation and the continued strength of our core businesses,” Pichai said in February. The fourth quarter was “driven by” leadership in AI, Pichai said, including the AI Overviews feature in Google Search.

On Amazon’s fourth quarter earnings call in February, the company said it expects to invest $100 billion in capital expenditures in 2025.

Amazon chief executive Andy Jassy said the company spent $26.3 billion in capital expenditures in the fourth quarter — a “vast majority” of which was on AI for Amazon Web Services. Jassy said the spend “is reasonably representative of what you could expect in annualized capex rate in 2025.”