On the latest Reuters Morning Bid podcast segment Powell era ends, hawks rise, the host flagged a milestone that sums up the entire 2026 market story: “the total spend now for 2026 from these big hyperscalers has now topped $700 billion.” The number, the host added, “is rising all the time” and “does mean more demand for chips, AI chips and tech equipment, which is one of the things that’s been driving most of the market in the last few weeks even.”
Wednesday night’s earnings dump showed why
Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL | GOOGL Price Prediction) spent $35.67 billion on capex in Q1 alone, more than doubling year-over-year, while Google Cloud backlog nearly doubled quarter on quarter to over $460 billion. CEO Sundar Pichai told investors “our AI investments and full stack approach are lighting up every part of the business”. Gemini now processes more than 16 billion tokens per minute via direct API use.
Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) outspent everyone. The company put $44.2 billion to work in the quarter as AWS grew 28%, its fastest pace in 15 quarters. Andy Jassy noted Amazon’s in-house chip business “topped a $20 billion revenue run rate (growing triple digits year-over-year)”. Anthropic committed to up to 5 GW of Trainium capacity.
Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) added $30.88 billion in fiscal Q3 capex, up 84% year over year, while Satya Nadella confirmed the AI business surpassed an annual revenue run rate of $37 billion, up 123% year-over-year. Commercial remaining performance obligations stand at $627 billion, nearly doubled.
The most aggressive guide came from Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META), which raised full-year 2026 capex to $125 to $145 billion from a prior $115 to $135 billion. The company cited higher component pricing and additional data center costs. Mark Zuckerberg framed it as funding for “personal superintelligence to billions of people.” Investors flinched. Meta shares fell 9.25% Thursday, the first real rebellion against the spending curve.
Where the dollars land
NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) remains the prime collector. Q4 data center revenue hit $62.31 billion, up 75% year-over-year, with networking up 263%. Jensen Huang called it “the agentic AI inflection point“. Polymarket assigns a 94% probability NVIDIA holds $200 through May.
The downstream layer matters too. Equinix reported ~60% of its largest Q4 deals were AI-driven, guided 2026 revenue to $10.12 to $10.22 billion, and is up 42.91% year to date. Power, cooling, and interconnect are now the bottleneck the $700 billion is trying to break.
The bull case writes itself. The bear case is simpler: free cash flow at Amazon declined 95% on a TTM basis to $1.2 billion. The next leg depends on whether enterprise AI revenue catches the capex curve before patience runs out.
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