Big Tech is investing absolute fortunes in data centers. Almost all of them seem to want to be prepared to meet the colossal demand for computing capacity for AI tasks. And yet, there is a curious and surprising exception.
Money, money and more money. The big technology companies have put all the meat on the grill with billion-dollar investment plans in data centers throughout 2025. Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft jointly invested more than $416 billion in capex during 2025, 66% more than the $251 billion in 2024. Google reached $91.5 billion, marking a new all-time high; Meta’s investment reached 72.2 billion dollars and Microsoft reached 118 billion.
By 2026, the climb continues: Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta are jointly committing about 725,000 million dollars in AI infrastructure in 2026, 77% more than in 2025, and analysts already project that the figure will exceed one billion in 2027. To give us a slight idea of what that figure means, it is higher than Sweden GDP in 2025 (662,000 million), that of Israel (610,000 million) and that of Singapore (574,000 million).
Apple. However, at Apple things are very different, and its Capex for 2025 remained the same. almost flat compared to 2024 with a total investment of 12,715 million dollars. It is a notable figure, of course, but it is far from the 20 billion dollars that Apple plans to invest in 2026.
And she is the one with the most money. It is also interesting to compare the investment that these companies will make with respect to their market capitalization. Amazon is the biggest bet here: its capex is equivalent to approximately 7.63% of its current market capitalization, followed by Microsoft, with 6.67%. Further behind appears Alphabet, with around 4.49%, and Meta, with around 3.04%; In contrast, Apple, which remains the most valuable company in the world, has a capex of only 0.29% of its market value.
Wall Street rules. The decisions of these companies seem to be greatly influenced by the behavior of the stock markets. The presentation of financial results and short-term forecasts has caused a kind of contagious effect: if we do not invest a fortune in data centers, shareholders are going to punish us a lot, Big Tech seem to have said with those colossal figures.
The big beneficiary is NVIDIA. Meanwhile, it is likely that the big beneficiary of these colossal investments will be NVIDIA, which will be the one that will receive a good part of that money if everything continues the current trend. There will undoubtedly be other beneficiaries in this area, but NVIDIA’s Capex is comparatively ridiculous, both with respect to those companies and compared to its current market capitalization ($4.75 billion).
Apple is going at a different pace with AI. The Cupertino firm clearly seems to have a very different strategy than its rivals in this segment. Google and Apple subscribed a collaboration for which the next generation of its assistant that will be based on Gemini models and Google cloud technology to power future Apple Intelligence featuresincluding a more personalized Siri.
The final deployment came at WWDC 2026: Apple presented “Siri AI”, a remake of the assistant integrated with its Apple Intelligence system developed in collaboration with Google’s Gemini models. The feeling, even internally, is that at Apple they are clear followers and that is not going to change at the moment.
A version of this article was published in February 2025.
Image | Unsplash (Bangyu Wang)
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