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The "Big Four" of Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon will invest US$2.4 trillion in the next few years, betting heavily on AI infrastructure
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Source: ithome.com
IT House news on August 1, according to a Bloomberg report on the 1st (today), Google parent company Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon have committed nearly 2.4 trillion US dollars in data center construction in the next few years (IT House note: the current exchange rate is approximately 16.24 trillion yuan), and the AI infrastructure competition is still heating up rapidly. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy believes that the current huge investment is consistent with AWS’s early expansion and is expected to eventually yield huge returns. The four companies' spending commitments on leasing, construction, energy and equipment to expand their data centers have ballooned over the past year. Some of the money will be invested in the near term, and some contracts will need to be fulfilled over the next few decades. Alphabet disclosed last week that outstanding purchase commitments, contractual obligations and leases that have not yet taken effect have totaled $902 billion (about 6.1 trillion yuan at current exchange rates), more than nine times a year ago. Funds will be used for technology equipment, energy purchases and lease agreements, regulatory filings show. The future expenditure disclosed by Meta is close to US$700 billion (approximately 4.74 trillion yuan at the current exchange rate), which is more than eight times that of a year ago. About half comes from data center leases that have not yet taken effect, some with payment periods as long as 30 years. The tech industry has been debating this year whether companies spending hundreds of billions of dollars building AI data centers will ultimately recoup their costs. Alphabet and Amazon's free cash flow has turned negative, and Meta is expected to follow suit soon. Despite this, the four companies have recently increased their spending plans, mostly for the same reasons: the demand for AI computing power is extremely huge, and the existing infrastructure is far from sufficient. However, not all the disclosed amounts are used for data centers, and the statistical calibers of each company are not completely consistent, making simple horizontal comparisons impossible. Part of Meta’s planned spending will go toward consumer hardware from its Reality Labs unit, and Alphabet and Amazon will also invest in content licensing fees.