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Big Tech capital expenditure soared in 2025. It’s going up another 50% in 2026.

Last quarter was one for the record books when it came to Big Tech’s purchases of property and equipment. Combined, Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Meta spent nearly $400 billion on capex, sans leases, in total last year, mostly in service of building out the AI infrastructure that they hope will furnish their futures.

And 2026 is only getting more expensive.

The four are expected to spend 50% more in 2026 than in 2025: roughly $600 billion. Amazon said it’s on the hook for $200 billion in capex this year, while Google expects to spend between $175 billion and $185 billion. Not too far behind, Meta estimated its 2026 capex would be $115 billion to $135 billion. Microsoft didn’t give an estimate, but analysts have its 2026 calendar year capex at around $114 billion. However, it should be noted that analysts’ expectations for 2026 were way lower than the reality for the rest.

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Tesla’s Model Y just cleared a new federal safety bar

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced today that Tesla Model Ys manufactured after November 12 were the first to pass the agency’s new advanced driver assistance system tests, which are now part of the New Car Assessment Program.

“By successfully passing these new tests, the 2026 Tesla Model Y demonstrates the lifesaving potential of driver assistance technologies and sets a high bar for the industry,” NHTSA Administrator Jonathan Morrison wrote in the press release. “We hope to see many more manufacturers develop vehicles that can meet these requirements.”

The new tests include:

  • Pedestrian automatic emergency braking

  • Lane-keeping assistance

  • Blind spot warning

  • Blind spot intervention

The milestone offers Tesla highly coveted regulatory validation, as it seeks to spur usage of its Full Self-Driving (Supervised) tech. The NHTSA didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

80x

We knew Claude Code was driving crazy growth at Anthropic, but it may be much more than the company is expecting.

Speaking at the company’s developer conference yesterday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said that while the company is planning for 10x growth this year, it could be as much as 80x, calling the overwhelming demand “crazy” and that he looked forward to more modest growth, saying such growth is “too hard to handle.”

The demand is so great that Anthropic partnered with Elon Musk’s xAI to buy up the bulk of computing from his Colossus data center in Tennessee.

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Tesla’s made-in-China vehicle sales jumped 36% in April

Tesla’s sales of made-in-China vehicles — sold across China, Europe, and other international markets — rose 36% year over year to 79,478 units in April. The increase marks the sixth straight month of annual growth in sales of vehicles made in the worlds largest manufacturing economy, suggesting the EV maker’s overseas business may be stabilizing after a difficult stretch.

That said, China wholesale deliveries fell from March, even as overall new energy vehicle sales rose 7% during the period.

Later this month, the China Passenger Car Association will report China-only sales, offering a clearer picture of performance in Tesla’s second-largest market.

Later this month, the China Passenger Car Association will report China-only sales, offering a clearer picture of performance in Tesla’s second-largest market.

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Anthropic’s scramble for compute now includes rival xAI

Another day, another major partnership with an AI rival. This time, Anthropic signed a deal with SpaceX’s xAI to access compute from its Colossus 1 data center to help it improve capacity for its Claude Pro and Claude Max subscribers. Just yesterday, The Information reported that Anthropic planned to spend $200 billion on Google Cloud services over the next five years. As Sherwood News’ Luke Kawa wrote:

“Anthropic has been a victim of its own success: the popularity of Claude Code and Cowork have revealed compute constraints and left users frustrated by caps. In response, the Claude developer has embarked upon a mad scramble for compute, striking or expanding deals with CoreWeave, Amazon, Google, and Broadcom.”

Now, it’s adding xAI to the list — even as the Elon Musk company builds a competing model.

In less terrestrial news, xAI said that as part of the agreement, Anthropic “expressed interest in partnering to develop multiple gigawatts of orbital AI compute capacity.”

“Anthropic has been a victim of its own success: the popularity of Claude Code and Cowork have revealed compute constraints and left users frustrated by caps. In response, the Claude developer has embarked upon a mad scramble for compute, striking or expanding deals with CoreWeave, Amazon, Google, and Broadcom.”

Now, it’s adding xAI to the list — even as the Elon Musk company builds a competing model.

In less terrestrial news, xAI said that as part of the agreement, Anthropic “expressed interest in partnering to develop multiple gigawatts of orbital AI compute capacity.”

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