In the last week of April 2026, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, and Meta reported their first-quarter results within forty-eight hours of one another.
The Big Four lifted their 2026 capex guides in unison. Apple reported the day after, decreasing capex year-over-year β and announcing a structural break from its decade-old βnet cash neutralβ policy.
The Financial Times then compiled the totals: $725 billion combined for the Big Four in 2026, up 77% from $410B in 2025 β the largest single-year concentrated infrastructure β as explored in the economics of AI compute infrastructure β cycle in the history of technology.
Q1 alone saw the Big Four spend $130 billion combined β 3.7Γ the $35 billion they spent in Q1 2023.
THE BUSINESS ENGINEER
Continue Reading: The AI Capex Map & The State of AI Hyperscalers
Gennaro Cuofano is a CRO and tech executive who has worked in AI since late 2015, starting with bringing NLP, natural-language generation, voice and chatbot products to the marketing industry. His background is in law and finance: he holds a Master's degree in Law and an International MBA with an emphasis on corporate finance (LUISS Business School and the University of San Diego, 2012), and worked as a financial analyst at a real-estate investment firm in San Diego and as an assistant controller. His work focuses on business model strategy, business engineering and, more broadly, structural analysis: how companies make money, read from their own filings. He created FourWeekMBA and leads research there and at The Business Engineer, his newsletter on AI and business strategy, with over 95,000 subscribers and more than 1,000 published analyses. His writing has also appeared on Entrepreneur (for example, How to Digitize a Family Business in Europe) and HackerNoon. Find him on LinkedIn and Substack. See how we source.
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