AI Spending

The math is stark: 8,000 people out, $145 billion in. That’s the deal Mark Zuckerberg laid out at a company town hall last week. No euphemisms about “restructuring for the future.” No corporate doublespeak about “aligning resources.” Just a blunt admission: compute infrastructure and people are Meta’s two major cost centers. With AI hardware costs exploding, something had to give. That something is 10% of Meta’s workforce, starting May 20th. And Zuckerberg wouldn’t rule out more cuts later this year. ...

Four earnings calls. One evening. One number that made Wall Street’s collective jaw hit the floor: $1 trillion. That’s the projected cumulative AI capital expenditure for Big Tech by 2027 — more than the GDP of the Netherlands, more than three times the value of the entire U.S. airline fleet, and the single largest corporate infrastructure bet in human history. But here’s what makes this story interesting: the market didn’t react to that number with uniform euphoria. It split cleanly down the middle. Google got a 10% pop. Meta got punched 8% in the face. Same thesis, same spending spree, wildly different verdicts. ...

Three-quarters of a trillion dollars. That’s how much Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, and Amazon plan to spend on capital expenditure in 2026 — and nearly all of it is aimed at AI infrastructure. Wednesday night’s earnings dump wasn’t just big. It was historically unprecedented. Every single hyperscaler either raised or reaffirmed their guidance upward, blowing past Wall Street’s already-aggressive $670 billion estimate. If anyone still questioned whether Big Tech was serious about the AI arms race, $725 billion in concrete, silicon, and fiber optic cable answers that definitively. ...