How the Big Tech companies are spending their huge capex budgets

Despite setting records for capital expenditure in 2025, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet are ratcheting up capex again this year, with analysts expecting an increase of 50% to a total of more than $600 billion in 2026. Tesla, which typically spends far less than Big Tech companies, plans to more than double its capex this year.

Alphabet spent $91.4 billion on capex last year, and forecasts $175 billion to $185 billion in 2026. Where is that money going? Well, in Alphabet’s case, it’s mainly looking at AI compute capacity for Google DeepMind.

Tesla’s going to outlay over $20 billion, specifically on “six factories, namely the refinery, LFP factories, Cybercab, Semi, a new Megafactory, the Optimus factory.” According to Deutsche Bank, about $8 billion is going to compute, $4.5 billion to vehicles, $3.5 billion to Optimus, and $3.5 billion for batteries and energy.

Meta, which spent $72 billion in 2025, is looking at 2026 capex guidance of $115 billion to $135 billion. That’s going toward model training at Meta Compute and all the stuff you need to do it.

Amazon is going from $131.8 billion to $200 billion, and it’s predominantly going to AWS.

Microsoft didn’t give formal guidance, so it’s possible its spending this year, like its peers, will ultimately exceed analysts’ expectations. Analysts put it at $116 billion this year, up from $83 billion last year.

The Takeaway

So, is it possible to be a megacap Magnificent 7 titan of tech without spending a fortune? Apple’s certainly trying to find out, for better or for worse. It had capex of $12.8 billion in calendar year 2025, and is looking at a 2026 calendar year capex estimate of merely $13.3 billion, per FactSet’s analyst forecast. That’s partly because a bunch of the time, its data center is someone else’s data center, and so someone else’s capex.

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