Data center costs surge past $170B in a single quarter as Big Tech’s AI arms race heats up

The four largest cloud and AI companies just spent $170 billion on data centers in a single quarter. That’s up 72% from the same period last year. Amazon, Alphabet (Google’s parent), Meta, and Microsoft are in the middle of an infrastructure spending spree. Wall Street estimates now peg their combined capital expenditure at roughly $1.5 trillion through the end of 2027. The numbers behind the buildout Amazon led the charge in Q2 2026 with $53 billion in capex, a 69% jump year-over-year. The company also raised its full-year guidance to approximately $220 billion, citing soaring memory chip costs as a key driver. Meta reported a 55% year-on-year increase in its infrastructure costs, pushing it to revise its 2026 capex target upward to $130 billion. Component price inflation alone added tens of billions to hyperscaler budgets during the quarter. In Q1 2025, industry capex was already up 53% year-over-year to $134 billion. All four companies have pledged investments in new power generation capacity to keep their servers running. Why crypto investors should be paying attention Nvidia, AMD, and other semiconductor firms are allocating massive portions of their output to hyperscaler cont...