Big Tech’s $1.1 trillion cloud computing backlog

Now that the big dogs of cloud computing have all reported their quarterly earnings, we can step back and get a sense of the searing demand that AI is driving toward their businesses.

Amazon, Google, and Microsoft each reported hundreds of billions in RPO (remaining performance obligations) — signed contracts for cloud computing services that can’t yet be filled and haven’t yet hit the books.

Collectively, the big three cloud providers reported a $1.1 TRILLION backlog of revenue.

This gargantuan demand could be good news for the “neoscalers” like CoreWeave and Nebius. But even CoreWeave is reporting a substantial backlog of its own — $55 billion last quarter.

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Allen & Co Brings Together Media And Tech Titans In Sun Valley

Analysts think Amazon’s sky-high capex is a good thing, even if there’s “shock value” for investors

That said, several analysts also lowered their price targets for Amazon the day after its downbeat earnings report.

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Apple of another’s AI

Apple is the only Big Tech company whose capex declined last quarter

One of these companies is not like the others.

Apple Headquarters in Cupertino of California

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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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Reddit gains after Q4 revenue and earnings exceed expectations, Q1 sales guidance tops estimates

Reddit reported fourth-quarter earnings Thursday.

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Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 gains financial research, improved coding features

It’s a model-for-model battle between OpenAI and Anthropic, as the startups vie for dominance in AI coding tools.

Not to be outdone by OpenAI’s release today of GPT-5.2-Codex, Anthropic has released a new model that also improves its coding skills: Claude Opus 4.6.

According to the release, the new model now has the ability to perform financial research, adding new utility to its Claude Cowork tool, which recently gained new legal work capabilities that made investors bet against established software companies. This time, the news is sinking financial research firms like FactSet and S&P Global.

Claude Opus 4.6 can help with longer, more complex coding projects and perform more detailed debugging and code review tasks. It also features improvements in its ability to work with documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.

Anthropic says the new model made strides in safety as well, showing extremely low rates of “misaligned behavior.”

Claude Opus 4.6

Anthropic says the new model made strides in safety as well, showing extremely low rates of “misaligned behavior.”

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