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The biggest companies in tech just threw out numbers so high they wiped out nearly a trillion dollars in market value. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Meta told investors they’ll spend $660 billion this year to build the future of AI.
Instead of getting excited, Wall Street dumped their shares, because these spending plans are so aggressive that people are now asking if we’re back in another tech bubble.
Amazon, Microsoft, and Google together have already lost $900 billion in value in the past week. It started right after they filed earnings.
Amazon and Microsoft hit hardest as AI costs explode for Big Tech
Amazon dropped 11 percent after it said this year’s capex will hit $200 billion, way above the $150 billion analysts were expecting.
CEO Andy Jassy said the company needs to invest big into AI, chips, robotics, and satellites. He pointed to a 24 percent rise in revenue at Amazon Web Services and said the money is already making a difference.
But no one was buying it.
Microsoft took an even bigger hit, as its stock fell 18 percent after it shared that quarterly spending on data centers jumped 66 percent. The company’s cloud revenue grew 26 percent, hitting $51.5 billion, but the market didn’t like that the growth wasn’t faster.
Then Microsoft revealed that 45 percent of its $625 billion backlog in cloud contracts comes from just one customer; OpenAI.
That raised alarm bells about over-reliance. Anna Nunoo, a senior analyst at AllianceBernstein, said, “The onus is on Microsoft and Amazon to prove out the attractive returns on all the spending.”
Google also saw its stock drop, even after announcing record profits. Alphabet made $132 billion in 2025 and passed $400 billion in annual revenue for the first time. But investors didn’t care. The company said it plans to double its capex to $185 billion this year, and that was enough to drag shares down.
Brent Thill, an analyst at Jefferies, said, “AI bubble fears are settling back in. Investors are in a mini timeout around tech, and nothing the companies say fundamentally matters.”
Meta gives back gains as software and chip deals collapse
Meta wasn’t spared either. It said its capex would double to $135 billion, and even though shares popped 10 percent at first, they quickly gave back those gains. The entire tech sector is under pressure now, and the Nasdaq index has dropped 4 percent over the past five days.
The market also reacted to the collapse of OpenAI’s $100 billion deal with Nvidia.
Oracle, which is tied to OpenAI for much of its future cloud business, fell 18 percent in five days. It raised $25 billion in debt but tried to calm things down, saying it was “highly confident in OpenAI’s ability to raise funds and meet its commitments.”
Software stocks got hammered too. Traders are nervous about AI coding tools from OpenAI and Anthropic that might replace existing software products. That fear spread fast and hit multiple names in the tech space.
Apple avoids the chaos as spending drops and sales rise
Apple is the one company that came out of this mess looking clean.Its shares went up 7.5 percent after reporting $144 billion in revenue last quarter, driven by strong iPhone 17 sales in both the US and China.
While everyone else was spending like crazy, Apple’s capex actually fell 17 percent to $2.4 billion in Q4, making a total of about $12 billion for the year.
In January, Apple signed a deal with Google to use its Gemini model to power Siri and other AI tools.Dan Hutcheson from TechInsights said, “Apple’s tiny capex is the AI dividend of partnering with Google for compute and frontier models.”
Apple basically lets Google handle the infrastructure while it pays for usage. Hutcheson added that this explains part of Google’s rising capex too.
All eyes are now on Nvidia. It’s the world’s most valuable public company and it’s about to report earnings. After three years of watching these tech giants spend endlessly on capex, investors want results. Drew Dickson, who runs Albert Bridge Capital, said:-
“We’ve evolved from an environment where capex alone was enough to trigger euphoria to one where the market expects it to translate into revenue growth in a time horizon that makes little sense.”
These companies are not being judged on hope anymore. They are being judged on cash.
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