Big Tech's Data Center Spending Soars: No Slowdown
The world’s leading technology companies are demonstrating an unabated commitment to expanding their data center infrastructure, with Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft all projecting significantly higher capital expenditures (capex) for the current fiscal year. This spending spree is largely driven by the surging demand for Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities and the continued growth of cloud computing services.
Google, for instance, has increased its 2025 capital expenditure guidance to an impressive $85 billion, up from an earlier forecast of $75 billion. This substantial investment is primarily allocated to its cloud infrastructure and AI processing capacity, with a significant portion directed towards servers and data centers to support Google Services, Google Cloud, and Google DeepMind. The company anticipates an increase in available capacity for its cloud business towards the end of 2025 and is already projecting a further increase in capex for 2026 to meet customer demand and power its products and services.
Meta Platforms has also significantly ramped up its data center investments, with a projected 2025 capex of $66 billion to $72 billion. This marks a substantial increase of approximately $30 billion year-over-year at the midpoint of their guidance range, reflecting additional data center investments to bolster their AI efforts and business operations. Meta’s CFO, Susan Li, noted that the company is still somewhat capacity constrained when it comes to data centers and is actively working to increase efficiency and bring more facilities online. The company anticipates another year of similarly significant capital expenditure growth in 2026 as it aggressively pursues opportunities to meet the demands of its AI initiatives.
Microsoft has articulated a plan for $80 billion in capex for 2025, an historic investment mirroring those of its hyperscaler counterparts. This spending is largely connected to its OpenAI partnership and cloud computing division, with a significant portion directed towards long-lived assets like data centers and server infrastructure, including GPUs and CPUs, to meet immediate demand. Microsoft’s Azure platform, which has seen substantial growth fueled by enterprise AI workloads, is central to this expansion. The company has added over 2GW of new data center capacity in the past year, expanding its global footprint to more than 400 facilities across 70 regions.
Amazon is also making substantial commitments, with projected capital expenditures of approximately $120 billion for fiscal year 2025, up from around $105 billion previously. Nearly all of this investment is earmarked for AI infrastructure, including Trainium 2 chips, multi-gigawatt data centers, and agentic AI across Alexa and Bedrock. Amazon’s CEO, Andy Jassy, stated that the company only procures infrastructure when there are significant signals of demand, viewing the expansion in AI-related capex as a positive sign for the AWS business in the medium to long term.
Apple, while not disclosing specific capex figures for its data centers in the same detailed manner as its peers, has indicated a significant increase in AI-related investment, driving higher capital expenditures. This includes ongoing expansion in private cloud compute and first-party data centers, as well as a planned $500 billion investment in the U.S. over the next four years across various areas including AI, silicon development, and R&D.
The collective spending by these tech giants underscores a broader industry trend. The demand for AI-ready data center capacity is expected to climb at an average of 33% annually from 2023 through 2030, with 70% of demand by then projected to be for data centers capable of hosting advanced AI. Globally, the data center market is experiencing unprecedented growth, with an estimated 10 gigawatts (GW) of new data center capacity expected to break ground in 2025, and 7 GW slated for completion. This rapid expansion is also driving innovations in data center design, with a focus on higher power densities, advanced cooling solutions like liquid cooling, and sustainable energy integration to meet the intense demands of AI workloads. The increased investment in data centers is also a key factor fueling the growth of the cloud computing market, which is projected to reach $1.6 trillion by the end of 2030.