Big Tech

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. ...

Everyone’s talking about who builds the best AI model. But the real bottleneck in artificial intelligence right now isn’t software — it’s concrete, copper wire, and electricity. KKR just put $10 billion behind that thesis. Helix Digital Infrastructure: The Pitch The private equity giant launched Helix Digital Infrastructure this week — a standalone company that will design, build, own, and operate the physical backbone AI depends on. Data centers. Power generation. Transmission lines. Cooling systems. The unsexy stuff that makes everything else possible. ...

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. ...

There’s a moment in every tech revolution when the money stops making sense to normal people. For AI, that moment arrived this week. Google just committed up to $40 billion in Anthropic — the company behind Claude. This landed four days after Amazon announced its own $25 billion deal with the same company. Combined: $65 billion in potential investment from two competing tech giants, into a single startup, in one week. ...

The European Commission just slapped Meta with a regulatory uppercut. On April 15, Brussels formally rejected Meta’s attempt to charge rival AI companies for access to WhatsApp’s 2 billion users — and threatened to force the tech giant to restore free access for competitors like Microsoft’s Copilot, OpenAI, and Perplexity. This isn’t just a legal skirmish. It’s the fight that decides whether you get to choose your AI assistant, or whether the company that owns your messaging app chooses for you. ...

Here’s a number that should stop you cold: Meta is planning to fire roughly 16,000 people — 20% of its entire workforce — while simultaneously doubling its AI spending to $135 billion in 2026. Fire the people. Fund the machines. It’s the most honest statement Big Tech has made about where things are going. The Layoffs Aren’t About Survival This isn’t 2022’s post-pandemic correction. Meta’s advertising business is still a cash machine. These cuts are proactive. The company isn’t trimming because it’s hurting — it’s reallocating capital from human labor to compute infrastructure. ...

Silicon Valley has a new business model: fire humans, hire GPUs. Meta is planning to cut roughly 20% of its workforce — about 16,000 people — to offset the staggering cost of its AI infrastructure ambitions. Reuters broke the story on March 14, citing sources who say top executives have already told senior leaders to start identifying where the axe falls. Meta spokesperson Andy Stone called it “speculative reporting about theoretical approaches.” Translation: we’re not announcing it yet. ...

Seven of the most powerful tech companies on Earth walked into the White House on March 4th and signed a piece of paper promising your electricity bill won’t go up because of AI. If that sounds too neat, you’re paying attention. What They Actually Signed Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle, and xAI committed to “build, bring, or buy” all the power their data centers consume. They’ll cover grid infrastructure upgrades, negotiate separate rate structures with utilities, and pay for electricity whether they use it or not. ...