Who Leads AI Infrastructure Investment?

The filings do not break out AI. Microsoft's 10-K says it will keep investing in capital expenditures "to support growth in our cloud offerings and our investments in AI training and other infrastructure." Alphabet describes its capex as "primarily" technical infrastructure, Meta's as servers, data centers and network infrastructure, and Oracle's jump as "primarily due to the expansion of our data centers." None gives an AI share.

Amazon is the only one of the five with a filed segment split, and it shows how much is not AI. AWS took $149.8B of Amazon's $228.1B in net property additions across 2024 and 2025, or 65.7%, on an accrual basis. The rest went to North America, International and corporate: the fulfilment network, transport, stores, offices and satellites.

Applied to Amazon's $214.8B cash total, that remaining third is about $74B, roughly 10% of the $723.1B. It is FactsFigs arithmetic across two accounting bases, so read it as a floor for spending that is not data-center cloud. AWS itself is all cloud, not only AI, so the AI share of Amazon's capex cannot be computed from the filing.

The only outside estimate we found is CreditSights, which wrote on 10 November 2025 that about 75% of aggregate hyperscaler capex in 2026 would be for AI infrastructure. It is a single source and a forecast for 2026, and the text we could read states no method, so it is not applied to the filed 2024 to 2026 totals here. We found no second estimate of an AI share.

Amazon's $214.8B is gross: $83.0B in 2024 and $131.8B in 2025, a 1.59x rise. Amazon also reports its own cash capex measure, net of proceeds from asset sales and incentives, at $77.7B and $128.3B, or $206.0B in all. On that definition its share is 28.8% rather than 29.7%, and the other four companies are unchanged. The ranking uses gross purchases because that matches the cash-flow line taken for the other four.

Management describes the spending as mainly "technology infrastructure (the majority of which is to support AWS business growth)" and added capacity for the fulfillment network, so the figure mixes cloud buildout with a retailer's logistics.

Microsoft takes a large share of its data-center capacity on finance leases, and those do not pass through the cash-flow line used for the ranking. The right-of-use assets it obtained were $20.5B in FY2025 and $24.6B in FY2026, $45.1B in all. That is 25.0% on top of its $180.5B, against $7.9B at Oracle, $3.8B at Amazon, $1.9B at Alphabet and $0.8B at Meta.

Add those assets to each company's total and Microsoft leads with $225.6B (28.8%) while Amazon falls to $218.6B (27.9%). Alphabet at $145.9B, Meta at $107.7B and Oracle at $84.7B keep their places. The lease-inclusive version mixes accrual and cash and is not the capex any company reports, so treat it as an indicator of direction and size.

We chose cash capex for the ranking because one rule treats all five the same, and it is the line the filings report. But the top two swap under the other defensible definition, so "Amazon leads" is a statement about cash. Companies draw the line differently themselves: Meta's own headline adds finance-lease principal, reaching $111.4B against $106.9B here.

The five windows cover different months. Amazon, Alphabet and Meta run January 2024 to December 2025, Oracle's runs June 2024 to May 2026 and Microsoft's July 2024 to June 2026. Capex rose 1.6x to 1.9x a year at four of the five and 2.6x at Oracle, so later windows are bigger, which flatters Microsoft and Oracle against the December filers.

Put everyone on calendar 2024 and 2025 and Alphabet is second at $144.0B, Microsoft third at $138.6B, and Oracle falls to $46.2B on its nearest quarter-ends, December 2023 to November 2025. Amazon's share rises from 29.7% to 33.0% and Microsoft's drops from 25.0% to 21.3%.

Take the 24 months to 30 June 2026 instead and Amazon reaches $280.7B, Alphabet $199.4B, Microsoft $180.5B, Meta $141.5B and Oracle $76.9B. Amazon first, Meta fourth and Oracle fifth hold in every scenario; only positions two and three flip. "Microsoft is second" is true only on fiscal-year windows, which is why each year-end is printed above.

Oracle's $76.9B is the smallest total, but its capex went from $21.2B in FY2025 to $55.7B in FY2026, a 2.62x jump in a year. FY2024 was $6.9B, so the latest year is 8.1x that, and 12.3x FY2022's $4.5B. Its first quarter of FY2027, June to August 2026, reached $28.5B on its own, equal to 37% of the whole two-year total, though it falls after the window.

The spending outran the cash. FY2026 operating cash flow of $32.0B against $55.7B of capex left free cash flow of about -$23.7B, a figure derived from the 10-K. In the same year the cash-flow statement shows $46.1B of proceeds from new senior notes and other borrowings, against $6.9B repaid, and $5.0B from mandatory convertible preferred stock.

The larger commitment sits off the ranking. Oracle reports $260B of additional lease commitments not yet started, substantially all data centers, due to commence from the first quarter of FY2027 to FY2029 on terms of 15 to 19 years. That is 3.4x its two-year capex, which is why Oracle is the extreme case of the lease caveat.

Against each company's fiscal 2022 the five spent $154.7B; in their latest complete years they spent $464.6B, 3.0x as much. Fiscal 2022 is the year that includes ChatGPT's 30 November 2022 launch for the three December filers, and the year to mid-2022 for Microsoft and Oracle. Oracle grew 12.3x ($4.5B to $55.7B), Microsoft 4.85x ($23.9B to $115.9B), Alphabet 2.90x ($31.5B to $91.4B), Meta 2.23x ($31.2B to $69.7B) and Amazon 2.07x ($63.6B to $131.8B).

Read it as scale, not a growth rate. The baselines sit three to four years before the latest year, and the climb was not smooth: Amazon fell to $52.7B in 2023, Meta to $27.0B, and Oracle dipped to $6.9B in FY2024 before its jump. The buildings that house this equipment are a separate measure, covered in our analysis of US Census construction data.

Leases signed but not yet started dwarf the ranking. At each company's latest year-end, undiscounted payments came to $329.1B at Microsoft (commencing FY2027 to FY2033), $260B at Oracle, $103.8B at Meta (2026 to 2030), $96.4B at Amazon and $58.5B at Alphabet, mostly for data centers. Operating and finance leases are not split, only finance leases would count as capex, and the dates differ, so we do not add them up. Meta reports a further $131.05B of other commitments, mostly third-party cloud capacity.

Announcements are intentions, not filings. The Stargate Project, announced on 21 January 2025 by OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle and MGX, intends to invest $500B over four years in US AI infrastructure and to begin deploying $100B immediately. It is its own company, and Oracle is an equity funder and technology partner, so Stargate's spending is not Oracle's capex.

Google said in November 2025 it would invest $40B in three Texas data centers through 2027, and Microsoft announced $17.5B for India over 2026 to 2029, covering data centers, AI infrastructure and skilling. Whatever the companies build under such plans reaches the filings as capex or leases when it happens, so adding announcements to the ranking would risk counting the same money twice.

Capex headlines often rest on estimates. Stanford's AI Index 2026 gives a 2025 capex figure for Google that is more than 60% above what Alphabet's own 10-K shows: "we spent $52.5 billion and $91.4 billion on capital expenditures" in 2024 and 2025. Adding finance-lease assets lifts 2025 only to $93.1B, and even the twelve months to June 2026 come to $132.4B.

The Index's sentence cites a chart labelled as Citi Research, with 2025 and 2026 marked as estimates, which suggests a projection was quoted as a reported figure. That is our inference, and we found no erratum. The lesson for any capex ranking is to name the basis: here it is filed cash purchases of property and equipment, with nothing forecast.

What it settles: on filed cash capex, Amazon leads at $214.8B, Oracle is smallest at $76.9B, and the other three sit between $106.9B and $180.5B. Amazon first, Meta fourth and Oracle fifth hold under every window and definition we tested, and the five together are spending about 3.0x what they did in fiscal 2022.

What it does not settle: how much of the $723.1B is AI, whether Amazon or Microsoft is first, and whether Microsoft or Alphabet is second. Those answers move with finance leases and fiscal years, and they will move again when the December filers publish fiscal 2026 around January and February 2027.