This is The Takeaway from today’s Morning Brief, which you can sign up to receive in your inbox every morning along with:
With the last of the hyperscalers having reported quarterly results, the market now has a full outlook on the year ahead from the biggest players in AI besides Nvidia (NVDA).
Going into Big Tech earnings, investors had been wondering whether the prospect of potentially “affordable” AI from DeepSeek would undermine the narrative that those hyperscalers — Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon — were uniquely positioning themselves for a big win by unleashing record-breaking investments in the new technology.
Already going into this week, we had an answer.
Meta (META) was nearly doubling its spend, and Microsoft (MSFT) was taking its $56 billion from last year to $80 billion. Then on Tuesday, Alphabet (GOOG, GOOGL) put $75 billion on the board.
And now, as our Chart of the Week shows, Amazon (AMZN) stepped in to hit 12 figures with $105 billion. Add up the Big Four’s AI shopping lists, and you get $325 billion, a 46% increase over last year.
Clearly, these companies remain all-in. And if you listen to the companies, they’re not building a “field of dreams” in hopes that demand will come — companies say they’re seeing demand.
“The vast majority of that capex spend is on AI for AWS,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said on the company’s earnings call, noting that “we don’t procure it unless we see significant signals of demand.”
Still, how much of this investment is actually making money remains the big question to answer this year — and how cagey execs are around that question may be an answer in and of itself. But as Jassy put it, these are investments for a “once-in-a-lifetime” opportunity, and one that will make shareholders happy “medium to long term.”
Which, for the time being, is good enough for Wall Street.
Ethan Wolff-Mann is a Senior Editor at Yahoo Finance, running newsletters. Follow him on X @ewolffmann.
