Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon and Oracle have committed to more than $3 trillion in future spending, according to a Bloomberg tally published on October 31. The money is earmarked mainly for data centers, chips and power. Unpaid leases account for about $1.3 trillion of the total, and other purchase commitments for about $1.9 trillion.
Most of that money is not yet on the balance sheet. Tech stocks in the US fell for several days in a row during the same week, and this bill is what investors have been staring at.
Commitments that stretch decades out
By Bloomberg's numbers, Alphabet's contractual commitments exceed $1 trillion, close to eight times the figure from a year earlier. Meta's future spending tops $800 billion, nearly half of it data center leases that have not yet commenced, with payment terms running as long as 30 years.
Oracle is regarded as the first large tech company whose free cash flow has turned negative because of its AI data center investments. It expects to return to positive territory by 2028 and plans to cut up-front outlays through vendor financing and customer prepayments.
These figures cannot be compared across companies at face value. Microsoft's purchase and construction data comes from its annual report for the period ending in late June and has not been updated since. Part of Meta's budget goes to consumer hardware. Alphabet's and Amazon's numbers also include content licensing fees. Because each company discloses on a different basis, "$3 trillion" is best read as an order of magnitude.
Cash flow has already turned negative
TechCrunch went through the latest quarterly filings and found that the four cloud and advertising giants have planned capital expenditure of more than $740 billion this year combined.
| Company | Capex this year | Free cash flow |
|---|---|---|
| Alphabet | Up to $205 billion | -$9.1 billion in Q3, negative for two straight quarters |
| Amazon | About $220 billion | -$42.4 billion over the trailing 12 months, versus +$14.8 billion a year earlier |
| Meta | Up to $145 billion | -$2.1 billion in Q3 |
| Microsoft | $45.2 billion in the latest quarter | +$18.6 billion in the latest quarter |
Microsoft is the only one of the four with positive cash flow, but its capital spending came in below the $50 billion it had previously projected. Reports attribute that to delayed delivery of third-party compute rather than a deliberate pullback.
Growth in the underlying businesses has not stopped. AWS revenue rose 39% and Meta's advertising revenue rose 26%, yet Amazon's shares still fell 7% and Meta's fell 10%. Alphabet's search advertising grew 12%, its slowest pace in five quarters, and the stock dropped 12% in a single day, erasing roughly $500 billion in market value. By Friday the Nasdaq had closed down 2.9%, with Nvidia off 4%, Broadcom down more than 5% and Qualcomm down 11%.
A rough back-of-the-envelope calculation
Adding leases and purchase commitments together puts the five companies' obligations at about $3.2 trillion. Using the four companies' $740 billion in capex this year as a yardstick, that equals a little over four more years at this year's pace. This is only an estimate: the commitments include leases of up to 30 years, and the group of five is not the same as the group of four.
Borrowing is easier to verify. TechCrunch puts combined 2026 borrowing by Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Oracle at $326 billion, triple last year's total.
Anthropic is on this bill too
Bloomberg also reported on Anthropic's IPO filing this week. Its balance sheet shows $117.5 billion in liabilities and $112 billion in cash, roughly a wash. Footnotes covering future leases and agreements for data centers, power and GPUs add up to nearly $900 billion. Anthropic says it plans to cover the commitments with higher revenue and continued fundraising, but declined to comment on their precise size. TechCrunch notes that its credit rating may fall short of investment grade, which would leave it more reliant on cloud providers and third-party financing.
One part of the picture remains unclear. Anthropic buys compute from Amazon, Google and others, and those cloud providers in turn sign leases and buy chips in order to deliver it. Future spending that one company writes down is likely to be revenue another company is counting on. Public filings do not show how large that overlap is, and nobody can say with confidence what the industry's net exposure is.
The next checkpoints are Anthropic's first earnings report after listing, and the cash flow figures Alphabet and Meta post next quarter.
Sources: Bloomberg, IT Home (as relayed), CocoLoop, TechCrunch. Commitment figures follow Bloomberg's tally; capex and free cash flow figures come from TechCrunch's review of each company's earnings filings.