Big Tech's AI spending spree is unprecedented

Big Tech's AI spending spree is unprecedented

The AI arms race is set to top $650 billion this year alone. And that's just between four companies. It's unprecedented in modern economic history

By Catherine Baab, Quartz Media

Feb 6, 2026

Earnings releases from just four companies competing to win the future of AI have revealed something predicted and yet still startling: Capital expenditures on the AI arms race are set to break records. They may even be propping up the entire U.S. economy.

Amazon $AMZN -6.04%’s earnings release on Thursday, after the market close, proved the high-water mark of recent capex announcements — with Amazon forecasting a whopping $200 billion spend just by itself.

"With such strong demand for our existing offerings and seminal opportunities like AI, chips, robotics, and low earth orbit satellites, we expect to invest about $200 billion in capital expenditures across Amazon in 2026,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in the release, "and anticipate strong long-term return on invested capital.”

Amazon spent about $130 billion on AI investments in 2025.

$650 billion figure makes history

In all, Amazon, Microsoft $MSFT +0.66%, Meta $META -2.21%, and Google $GOOGL -2.46% plan to spend about $650 billion in 2026. As Bloomberg reported, it's “a mind-boggling tide of cash earmarked for new data centers and the long list of equipment needed to make them tick, including artificial intelligence chips, networking cables and backup generators.”

This amount of concentrated corporate spending is essentially unprecedented in modern economic history, experts say, even accounting for the telecom boom of the 1990s and the construction of railroads circa the 1840s and 1850s. The sheer amount, the concentration of companies, and speed of the spending will likely all break records. Past booms saw capital expenditures spread across many more companies and many more years.

During the 1990s telecom boom, for instance, peak annual spending hit roughly $200 billion, adjusted for inflation, across dozens of companies. This year, just four tech giants are projecting more than three times that amount.

The $650 billion also marks an increase of roughly 60% over these companies' spending in 2025, which totaled about $400 billion — even as 2025 marked an almost 50% increase over these companies' 2024 investments, which totaled about $240 billion.

Showing up as a slice of GDP

This pace of growth in spending and sheer size of spending shows up even in headline numbers. Numerous commentators and economists note that AI spending is now large enough to be visible in total GDP numbers. In some recent quarters, this growth in spending even outpaced the contributions of the U.S.'s long-recognized primary economic-growth input, consumer spending.

“In the first half of 2025, AI-related capital expenditures contributed 1.1% to GDP growth,” JPMorgan $JPM +3.92% strategist Stephanie Alliaga noted, “outpacing the U.S. consumer as an engine of expansion.”