Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon capex spending to hit $725 billion in 2026, up 77% from last year — analyst says bear thesis is ‘garbage’

Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon capex spending to hit $725 billion in 2026, up 77% from last year — analyst says bear thesis is 'garbage'

CEO Mark Zuckerberg offered no firm schedule for releasing improved AI models to follow the recently launched Muse Spark. Asked about the pace of Meta's AI agent development, Zuckerberg told investors: "There's a lot of agents out there that people are building for different things, but there aren't that many that I would want to give to my mother."

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henryv1 Yeah, the numbers are insane—~$725B in capex for 2026 is a 77% jump YoY , mostly driven by AI infra (data centers, GPUs, memory, etc.) . And to be fair, there is real growth backing some of it—cloud revenue (especially Google/Amazon) is exploding, which helps justify at least part of the spend. But the skepticism isn’t coming out of nowhere: Even now, a lot of this spending is front-loaded with unclear ROI timelines Depreciation costs on AI hardware are ramping hard and could eat into profits soon Some companies (Meta especially) are getting punished despite strong revenue because investors don’t see a clear monetization path yet There are legit concerns this turns into a capacity oversupply + price war if AI services commoditize At the same time, bulls aren’t wrong either: Hyperscalers are basically in an arms race— not spending is probably riskier than overspending Early signs (cloud + enterprise AI demand) suggest this isn’t just hype If AI becomes foundational like cloud/mobile, today’s capex might look cheap in hindsight So the real answer is probably somewhere in the middle: This isn’t “obviously dumb money”… but it’s also not guaranteed payoff. It’s a high-risk, high-conviction infrastructure bet , and the market is still figuring out whether it’s the next cloud boom—or another overbuild cycle like telecom in the early 2000s. Curious to see who actually converts this into profit first—that’s where the narrative will flip fast. Reply

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