Big Tech spent $725 billion on AI. Then they ran out of money in their pockets.

This is non-stop. Big tech companies have already spent an irreverent amount of money in 2025 to not lose footing in the AI ​​race, but this year things are getting better. Together Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Meta have announced a capex of $725 billion, which represents an astonishing 77% growth over last year’s (also astonishing) figure of $410 billion. The numbers they are dizzyingbut they are having a worrying consequence.

A lot of money saved. For years, Big Tech has been able to boast extraordinary accounting books in which revenues and profits have practically not stopped growing. They’ve built up exceptional cash flow, but now they’re taking advantage of all that money to fund an AI race that doesn’t seem to end at the moment.

Cash flow plummets. The amount of investments is of such magnitude that all of these hyperscalers have encountered a problem: their cash flow—the available liquidity— has collapsedthey indicate in the Financial Times, and now it is at levels that we have not seen since 2014. Before, the average was to have 45,000 million dollars since the pandemic, but now that figure is expected to fall to 4,000 million in the third quarter of 2025.

Source: Financial Times.

Let’s see who spends more. Amazon leads this unique race for spend more than others. The company led by Andy Jassy foresees an investment of 200,000 million dollars in 2026, which will lead it to burn about 10,000 million of its cash flow this year. Meta will continue that same trend in the second half of the year, while Microsoft could enter negative territory in at least one quarter. Even Google, which remains positive, will post its lowest level of cash flow in a decade.

Debt, new fuel for AI. To finance this deployment, both Alphabet and Meta have had to resort to massive debt issues and suspend their share buyback programs for the first time in almost a decade. Alphabet issued $48 billion in bonds recently (in February a partdoes some days other), while Meta sumo 55,000 million debt in just six months.

Bet now to win later. This strategy marks a paradigm shift: it is no longer investing only with the income one has in cash, but Big Tech is mortgaging its future. The objective is what we have mentioned time and time again: not to lose step in a race where, as Zuckerberg said, staying behind is not an option.

Disguising the beads. These companies fear Wall Street’s reaction to these movements, so they are moving billions of dollars in infrastructure but they are doing so outside of their conventional balance sheets. In the FT they explain how Big Tech are using special investment vehicles that allow them to attract external capital and hide debt. They are also more opaque about who will be impacted if the AI ​​does not meet expectations. The memory crisis is also having an impact: in such a way that Microsoft already has added 25 billion dollars to its investment needs this year just to be able to assume the increase in component prices.

The danger of going with the flow. CEOs justify these moves by comparing them to what happened with cloud investment two decades ago, but analysts warn: investing when the competition invests is not always a strategic choice, but rather a forced response to staying out of the race.

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