Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet are about to spend a shocking amount of money to dominate the AI era

The artificial intelligence spending for Big Tech has only just begun.

The news: Goldman Sachs strategist Amanda Lynam has put some fresh numbers on hyperscaler capex spending on AI, and it’s eye-popping.

Goldman now expects a combined $5.3 trillion of capex spending for the four largest hyperscalers — Meta (META), Microsoft (MSFT), Amazon (AMZN), and Alphabet (GOOGL) — from fiscal year 2025 to fiscal year 2030. Prior to the start of first quarter earnings, this figure stood at $4.5 trillion.

The baseline aggregate capex estimate stands at $7.6 trillion between 2026 and 2031, across compute, data centers, and power.

The analysis: Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta alone collectively plan to allocate $725 billion to capital expenditures in 2026 — up a staggering 77% from last year’s already record-breaking $410 billion.

Amazon is projecting $200 billion in capital expenditures, Alphabet is targeting $175 billion to $185 billion, Meta is guiding $115 billion to $135 billion, and Microsoft is tracking toward $190 billion for the calendar year.

The five main hyperscalers (the other one is Oracle (ORCL) have plans to add roughly $2 trillion in AI-related assets to their balance sheets by 2030.

“Infrastructure spending is cool again,” Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins said on Yahoo Finance’s Opening Bid. The networking giant has seen a large uptick in AI-related orders, in part due to spending by the hyperscalers.

The bottom line: Hopefully, for all four of these companies, these investments pay off in accelerated top- and bottom-line growth rates. There is no wiggle room here; investors demand strong returns in the future if profits are going to be somewhat constrained today while the hyperscalers build data centers in Podunk.