Bloomberg) — Alphabet Inc. said it was going to spend far more than planned in 2026, shocking investors on the cost of the artificial intelligence boom. Shares fell more than 7% in late trading.

    The Google parent said it will spend $175 billion to $185 billion this year, compared with the $119.5 billion analysts expected. The company’s fourth-quarter sales, excluding partner payouts, were $97.23 billion, surpassing the $95.2 billion expected on average by analysts, according to data compiled by Bloomberg

    ALPHABET SEES 2026 CAPEX $175B TO $185B, EST. $119.5B
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    Posted by cxr_cxr2

    26 Comments

    1. Holy shit on that capex number but like I’ve been saying for months now, where companies are spending continues to be a mostly better bet than the companies doing the spending.

    2. Right when I sold my NVDA calls to shield myself from the eventual blowback of a good ER…

    3. AI is so bonkers right now. It’s destroying software companies because it’s so advanced… but people are also worried companies are spending too much on it lol.

    4. This is an AI arms race.  Spending will continue to increase as this is an existential crisis for losers. 

    5. AnonThrowaway998877 on

      I don’t care how they want to spend their money, it has clearly been working. Got them where they are. The revenue is insane.

    6. **Google is now 3rd in profit (35B) behind Apple (42B) and Microsoft (39B)**

      Highest capex, YouTube below estimates, slowest cloud growth and smallest cloud revenue.

      Don’t worry. It’s up 5%.

    7. Moist-Reflection-673 on

      It’d better be worth it, or it could do a MSFT dive at some point. I’m sticking with AAPL.

    8. Thick_Wallaby1 on

      Its a law, everything will come to equilibrium.

      Earlier x amount of time would be needed for a task. Now it will be x/6.

      Software costs will become cheap. More engineers would be laid off. Hiring would be slow.

      I believe cost would be recovered not immediately but from future

    9. Reddit: “Google will win AI wars because their TPUs make AI investment cheaper”

      In reality, Google is spending more on AI hardware than OpenAI, Anthropic, and X.AI combined, just to produce an inferior product.

      The only real winner here is Broadcom(who Google buys their TPUs from, and possibly Micron/SK Hynix/Samsung who make HBM and TSMC for manufacturing the chips themselves).

    10. I can understand shares falling if investors are shocked by results (not in this case), but it makes very little sense to be shocked by capital spending. Google didn’t get where it is by falling behind its competitors. If you think AI is nonsense, you shouldn’t be invested in any of these companies. If anything, I’d mark these companies down if I thought they weren’t competing hard enough for what might be a winner takes all prize.

    11. ChronicScroll3r on

      Bullish, more spending means there’s high demand.

      Like AMD Lisa Su expressed she didn’t expect the higher demand so quick!

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