(Noah Berger/Getty Images)

CAPEXPECTATIONS

Amazon plans on spending more than $100 billion on capex in 2025

In total, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Alphabet intend to spend a whopping $315 billion in capital expenditures this year.

Jon Keegan, David Crowther

2/7/25 11:05AM

While Amazon’s Q4 earnings may have disappointed investors with some gloomy guidance for the current quarter, its plans for 2025 are grand indeed.

In the past few weeks, all of Big Tech has been revealing the scale of its plans for spending on AI infrastructure, and it’s like everyone is trying to outdo each other with increasingly massive capex estimates.

At the start of the year, Microsoft’s president, Brad Smith, wrote in a blog post that the company was on track to spend $80 billion on AI data centers in 2025.
Then, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said his company would spend up to $65 billion on capex, including a city-sized data center.
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai upped the ante, pledging $75 billion for AI and related infrastructure, including undersea cables.
Not to be outdone, Amazon CFO Brian T. Olsavsky told analysts on the Q4 earnings call that his company’s Q4 capex of $26.3 billion “will be reasonably representative of our 2025 capital investment rate,” which works out to over $100 billion.

Taken together, the top players in the industry are committing over $315 billion for this year alone.

4 big tech companies plan on spending $315+ billion on capex this year

“Lumpy” growth for AWS

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy sounded extremely bullish about the company’s AWS cloud computing unit — which had $28.8 billion in sales for Q4 — but warned, “We expect growth will be lumpy over the next few years,” due to fast-changing technology and unpredictable capacity planning.

Amazon is in a unique position in the current AI revolution, as it offers up solutions for each layer of the “AI stack.” It hosts cloud computing to train new models, runs any number of leading AI models, and quickly offered DeepSeek’s breakthrough models for its customers on its Bedrock and SageMaker platforms.

It also makes its own foundational model family named Nova, in addition to its Rufus AI shopping assistant, and is still working out the kinks on its next-generation Alexa.

In addition to selling cloud computing powered by market leader Nvidia, Amazon is also a few generations into its own specialized AI computing chips, “Trainium” and “Inferentia.”

When asked about the race to the bottom for computing costs fueled by new, cheaper approaches to train and run AI systems like DeepSeek, Jassy thought it would just translate into more business for the company, agreeing with Jevons Paradox:

“People thought that people would spend a lot less money on infrastructure technology. And what happens is companies will spend a lot less per unit of infrastructure, and that is very, very useful for their businesses. But then they get excited about what else they could build that they always thought was cost prohibitive before, and they usually end up spending a lot more in total on technology once you make the per unit cost less.”

Leap year wrinkle

As a reminder of the massive scale of Amazon’s business, the extra day on the 2024 calendar due to leap year actually affected the company’s guidance for the current quarter.

Just that one extra day generated $1.5 billion in sales across all of its units.

Hyunsoo Rim, David Crowther

HEAD OF MACROS

Pop-Tarts, Doritos, and Uncrustables have joined the protein craze taking over America’s snack aisle

Food giants are catching up with the latest diet obsession.

Apple TV dropped the “plus” as streamers keep pulling back on originals

After the spray-and-pray approach led to a wave of cancellations, Hollywood is settling into an era of just making fewer shows.

Hyunsoo Rim9h

Max Knoblauch10/14/25

The average price of a new vehicle in the US passed $50,000 for the first time ever in September

The average price of a new vehicle in the US surpassed $50,000 in September, according to Cox Automotive’s Kelley Blue Book.

At $50,080, that’s the highest industry average ever, reflecting the price hikes faced by new car buyers in recent years amid pandemic supply shortages, tariff-induced increases, and the high cost of EV production. The figure marks a 3.6% jump from the same month last year.

“Tariffs have introduced new cost pressure to the business, but the pricing story in September was mostly driven by the healthy mix of EVs and higher-end vehicles pushing the new-vehicle ATP into uncharted territory,” Cox executive analyst Erin Keating said. Passing the $50,000 mark was inevitable, Keating said, especially considering that the country’s bestseller is a Ford truck that “routinely costs north of $65,000.”

Year over year, new vehicle prices rose nearly 6% for GM, while Ford’s climbed 2.5%. Volkswagen new prices were up 12.5%.

As prices climb, so do delinquencies on loans to borrowers with lower credit scores. Recent data from Fitch Ratings shows the portion of subprime US auto loans 60 days or more overdue reached 6.43% in August.

Nia Warfield10/14/25

Alibaba slides as the e-commerce giant’s cloud arm reportedly plans to slash overseas prices

Alibaba slipped more than 3% Tuesday morning following reports that its cloud unit will cut prices of select Elastic Compute Service products by up to 10.2% in overseas markets including Frankfurt, Tokyo, and Dubai.

The cuts, effective October 30, reflect the company’s push to expand its global footprint. The moves reflect a more targeted regional approach for the company as it seeks to strengthen its footprint in Europe and Asia. Alibaba Cloud made similar price cuts on international cloud products last year.

Competition is hot: Alibaba Cloud sits behind behemoths Amazon, Microsoft, and Google in the global cloud race, coming in fourth worldwide, according to data from Gartner.

Max Knoblauch10/14/25

GM dips after revealing it will take a $1.6 billion Q3 hit due to its EV pullback

A few weeks after the end of the $7,500 federal EV tax credit — and the end of General Motors’ attempt to extend it — GM says slowing EV sales will cost it $1.6 billion in its third quarter.

“Following recent US Government policy changes, including the termination of certain consumer tax incentives for EV purchases and the reduction in the stringency of emissions regulations, we expect the adoption rate of EVs to slow. These developments have caused us to reassess our EV capacity and manufacturing footprint,” GM wrote in a Tuesday filing.

As a result, GM said, the company will take a $1.2 billion charge pegged to EV capacity adjustments. An additional $400 million cash hit will come from canceled EV contracts with suppliers. The automaker said it’s “reasonably possible” that it will incur more EV-related charges in the coming quarters.

GM reports its third-quarter earnings next week. In the first half of the year, rival Ford has posted losses to the tune of $2.18 billion related to its EV business.