Meta, Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon capex

Sherwood News

Capex marks the spot

Big Tech capex approaches $100 billion and Dan Ives loves it

AI spending shows no signs of flagging.

10/30/25 10:40AM

Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, and Microsoft are approaching a record combined capex spending of nearly $100 billion for the quarter ended in September, as the tech giants plow ahead on AI spending. Their guidance for next year suggests this chart will keep going up and to the right:

Amazon, which reports earnings today, is the only one not expected to hit record purchases of property and equipment for the quarter. The FactSet analyst consensus estimate pegs Amazon’s capital expenditure at $31.9 billion in Q3, down slightly from the $32.2 billion it posted in Q2. (The other companies all reported yesterday.)

For what it’s worth, Wedbush Securities analyst and AI booster Dan Ives loves it. In a trio of notes after earnings, Ives praised their AI spending.

Here’s what he said about Meta:

“While the ultimate level of investment contemplated this year has increased, we believe the spending has been justified, with the infusion of AI capabilities across the company’s ad stack and content recommendation engines driving tangible results for Meta’s Family of Apps and Reality Labs.”

Microsoft:

“MSFT provided another quarter of strong guidance for FY2Q26 as it remains clear that FY26 remains the true inflection year of AI growth for Microsoft with CIOs lining up behind the red ropes to build for deployments in Redmond as the company invests aggressively to capture this opportunity.”

And Alphabet:

“In our view, 3Q performance further validates Alphabet’s position as a leading AI beneficiary, with management already observing tangible results across advertising and cloud.”

On Wednesday, Wedbush announced that the Dan IVES Wedbush AI Revolution ETF, which holds the 30 companies Ives considers the best positioned to cash in on the ongoing boom, surpassed $1 billion in assets under management in less than five months.

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Prediction markets have, predictably, been given a boost by the summer of sports

Major platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket have seen huge upticks in users of late, thanks in no small part to what’s felt like a recent sporting smorgasbord, with major competitions across hockey, basketball, and soccer soaking up fans’ time (and spending, clearly) at the outset of summer.

While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

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South by Southwest Conference and Festivals

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TAKING ACCOUNTS

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Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5