The top technology companies in the United States currently plan to invest up to US$725 billion in capital expenditures this year, mainly in the field of AI data center equipment. Google's parent companies, Alphabet and Meta, both raised their full-year capital expenditure guidance; Microsoft gave its full-year expenditure forecast as of the end of December for the first time, which was the same as Alphabet's, both at US$190 billion.
Among the four major hyperscale cloud vendors (collectively referred to as supercomputing giants in the industry), only Amazon has maintained its expenditure forecast unchanged at US$200 billion; however, the company's expenditures surged sharply in the first quarter, and free cash flow narrowed accordingly.
"We are raising our forecast for infrastructure capital spending this year," Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on an analyst call on Wednesday. The company raised the upper end of its spending planning range to $145 billion.
"The main reason for the increase is the increase in the cost of hardware components, especially the increase in the price of memory chips. However, judging from various signals from our own business and the entire industry, we are confident that we will stick to this investment."
The performance of the four technology giants with a market value of trillions of US dollars was overall strong, and many core indicators met or exceeded expectations, providing support for increased capital expenditures.
However, the market reaction is divided: Amazon and Alphabet's financial reports performed better than Meta; the market also believes that Meta's investment risk is higher than that of its peers - Microsoft, Amazon, etc. deploy cloud computing and can rent out idle computing capacity to hedge investment costs.