Amazon, Microsoft and Google together shelled out $110 billion in capital expenditures as the buildout to handle high-capacity AI workloads continued during the three months ended March 31.
AWS parent company Amazon led the pack with a reported $43.2 billion in capex, primarily to meet customer demand for generative AI, SVP and CFO Brian Olsavsky told investors during a Q1 2026 earnings call on Wednesday.
“The faster AWS grows, the more short-term capex we will spend,” the company’s President, CEO and Director Andy Jassy said, noting the investments covered “cash for land, power, buildings, chips, servers and networking gear … We've been through this cycle with the first big AWS growth wave and like the results.”
Microsoft’s quarterly capex was $31.9 billion, two-thirds of which went toward GPUs, CPUS and other short-lived assets, EVP and CFO Amy Hood said during a Q3 2026 earnings call Wednesday. With its Azure and other cloud services segment revenues growing 40% year over year, the company plans to increase capital investments to $40 billion next quarter.
Today’s data center investments are earmarked for tomorrow’s workloads, as Microsoft and its competitors continue to add generative AI features to core offerings.
“We want to make sure we are getting the capex to get the capacity in time for those increases in usage,” Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella said. “If you think about even Agent Mode in Excel, it sort of kind of didn't work until it started working. And that's just because the model showed up … you have to be ready for those opportunities.”
Google SVP and CFO Anat Ashkenazi gave investors a breakdown of the company’s $35.7 billion capex during the company’s Q1 2026 earnings call Wednesday. The overwhelming majority went toward technical infrastructure to support AI across the company — 60% for servers and 40% for data centers and networking equipment.
Cloud’s immense appetite for data center resources is far from sated.
Google upped its projected capex for the year by at least $5 billion to $190 billion, inclusive of costs related to the acquisition of data center and energy infrastructure provider Intersect, which closed in March.
The magnitude of the capex blitz is, to date, supported by substantial growth in the global market for cloud services, according to Synergy Research Group. Enterprise cloud spending increased by more than $35 billion year over year to $129 billion during the first three months of 2026, marking the ninth consecutive quarter of the growth rate has increased, the analyst firm reported Wednesday.
“The numbers are huge, but so is the financial strength of these companies,” SRG Chief Analyst John Dinsdale told Channel Dive. “Our forecasts are clear that cloud revenues will keep growing faster than capex.”
An ongoing run on semiconductors has far-reaching implications across the tech sector and channel, straining component supply chains and driving up costs for PCs, servers and related network hardware.
More than half of the nearly $10 billion Microsoft plans to add to its capex next quarter will be eaten up by higher component prices and finance leases, Hood said. The company's sales of Windows devices exceeded expectations as its OEM and channel partners responded to inflationary signals by stockpiling memory chips.
Gartner expects memory costs to more than double and storage prices to increase 243% this year. Constraints aren’t likely to ease until 2027, the analyst firm said.
