Tech companies are fighting to claim the title of having the world’s most advanced AI. The goal is to supercharge their bottom line and keep investors and Wall Street happy. But developing the world’s most advanced AI means spending billions on data centers and other physical infrastructure to house and power the supercomputers needed for AI. It also means a drain on natural resources and the grid in the areas surrounding data centers worldwide.
Still, last week’s earnings reports made clear that tech firms are forging ahead. Google announced it was planning to spend $85bn on building out its AI and cloud infrastructure just in 2025 – $10bn more than it initially predicted. And the company expects that spending to increase again in 2026. For context, Google reported $94bn in revenue in the second quarter of this year. Chief executive Sundar Pichai said Google is in a “tight supply environment” when it comes to the infrastructure needed to support AI processing and compute. The results of this increased spending would still take years to be realized, he said.
Google isn’t alone. Amazon has said it plans to spend $100bn in 2025 – the “vast majority” of which will go to powering the AI capabilities of its cloud division. As a point of comparison, Amazon spent just under $80bn in 2024.Sometimes people make the assumption that if you’re able to decrease the cost of any type of technology component … that somehow it leads to less total spend in technology,” said Amazon’s CEO Andy Jassy during an earnings call in February. “We’ve never seen that to be the case.”
Meta, too, has upped the amount it plans to spend on AI infrastructure. In June, Mark Zuckerberg said the company planned to spend “hundreds of billions” of dollars on building out a network of massive data centers across the US including one that the firm expects to be up and running in 2026. Originally, executives said the firm was projected to spend $65bn in 2025 but adjusted that to anywhere between $64bn and $72bn.
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