There is a number going around tech right now that I genuinely cannot fit in my head.
Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Meta plan to spend somewhere around $725 billion on capital expenditure in 2026. Most of that is data centers, chips, and the power to run them. That figure is up roughly 77 percent from about $410 billion the year before, based on earnings figures compiled by the Financial Times.
Read that again. It is not a plan for the decade. It is one year.
I want to walk through where this money is going and who is supposed to pay it back, because once you sit with the second number in this story, the whole thing starts to feel less like a strategy and more like a dare.
A bet the size of a small economy
