{"id":311972,"date":"2025-08-02T13:03:09","date_gmt":"2025-08-02T13:03:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/311972\/"},"modified":"2025-08-02T13:03:09","modified_gmt":"2025-08-02T13:03:09","slug":"big-tech-has-spent-155bn-on-ai-this-year-its-about-to-spend-hundreds-of-billions-more-artificial-intelligence-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/311972\/","title":{"rendered":"Big tech has spent $155bn on AI this year. It\u2019s about to spend hundreds of billions more | Artificial intelligence (AI)"},"content":{"rendered":"

The US\u2019s largest companies have spent 2025 locked in a competition to spend more money than one another, lavishing $155bn on the development of artificial intelligence<\/a>, more than the US government has spent on education, training, employment and social services<\/a> in the 2025 fiscal year so far.<\/p>\n

Based on the most recent financial disclosures of Silicon Valley\u2019s biggest players, the race is about to accelerate to hundreds of billions in a single year.<\/p>\n

Over the past two weeks, Meta, Microsoft<\/a>, Amazon, and Alphabet, Google\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Capex, as the term is abbreviated, is a proxy for technology companies\u2019 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<\/a> said during its most recent earnings call that its capital expenditure \u201cprimarily reflects investments in servers and data centers to support AI\u201d.<\/p>\n

Meta\u2019s 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<\/a> 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\u2019s capex would be at least 50% more than the outlay during the same period a year earlier and greater than the company\u2019s record capital expenditures of $24.2bn in the quarter to June.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe will continue to invest against the expansive opportunity ahead,\u201d Hood said.<\/p>\n

For the coming fiscal year, big tech\u2019s 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The multibillion-dollar figures represent mammoth investments, which the Journal points out is larger than the European Union\u2019s quarterly spending on defense. However, the tech giants can\u2019t seem to spend enough for their investors. Microsoft, Google and Meta<\/a> 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\u2019s market capitalization hit $4tn the day after its report.<\/p>\n

Even Apple<\/a>, 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Tim Cook, Apple\u2019s CEO, said Thursday that the company was reallocating a \u201cfair number\u201d of employees to focus on artificial intelligence and that the \u201cheart of our AI strategy\u201d is to increase investments and \u201cembed\u201d AI across all of its devices and platforms. Cook refrained from disclosing exactly how much Apple is spending, however.<\/p>\n

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\u201cWe are significantly growing our investment, I\u2019m not putting specific numbers behind that,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Smaller players are trying to keep up with the incumbents\u2019 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The US\u2019s largest companies have spent 2025 locked in a competition to spend more money than one another,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":311973,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3163],"tags":[323,1942,53,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-311972","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-technology","11":"tag-uk","12":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114959312655219785","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311972","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=311972"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311972\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/311973"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=311972"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=311972"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=311972"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}