MAMA, I just spent $700 billion

I feel much better about the money literally flowing out the dollar to produce the Spritzler Report.

MAMA, I just spent $700 billion

Chart R

Big tech has been splurging on data centers, servers, and more for some time now. But, after the latest host of big-tech earnings, we are starting to reach almost comical levels of money. This week, a subset of the BATMMAAN group, Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Amazon (or MAMA), all reported earnings — and three of four boosted their capex budgets for 2026.

Proportionally, it was Meta that increased its capex the most, increasing guidance to between $125 billion and $145 billion, up about 8% from its previous forecast. There were smaller bumps from Microsoft and Alphabet, while Amazon remained the lone outlier that didn’t boost its own spending plans… perhaps because it’s already at a gargantuan ~$200 billion.

Collectively, those four companies are planning to spend roughly $700 billion on capex in the coming year as they continue to build out the infrastructure to support their AI ambitions.

However, investors have reacted very differently to Big Tech’s spending strategy: Alphabet was up 10% on Thursday, whilst Meta dipped some 9%. The crucial differentiator seems to be not what they are spending, but how they are planning to use that giant sum.

Google is not only making high-end tensor processing unit AI chips for internal use, but it also confirmed that it will begin delivering those chips to other companies this year — and Meta is reportedly already among its customers. In other words, Google is positioning itself to profit from the broader AI ecosystem. Meta, meanwhile, is building inference-optimized chips primarily to lower its own costs.

As Meta remains largely a renter of infrastructure, Google is becoming a landlord. Nowhere is that clearer than in Google Cloud, where revenue grew 63% to over $20 billion last quarter, providing a massive engine to offset its infrastructure bills.