$600B AI Arms Race: US Tech Giants Bleed Cash, Apple Bows Out
Meta, Amazon, Microsoft and Google to spend over $600 billion on AI infrastructure in 2026, surpassing Sweden's GDP. Apple bucks the trend with 19% capex cut, partnering with Google Gemini instead.
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Four companies are pouring money into AI infrastructure, with annual investments equivalent to the entire GDP of a country.
According to reports from Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal, and multiple other media outlets, U.S. tech giants are currently caught up in a “frenzy” of AI infrastructure investment, with their total annual capital expenditure even surpassing the full-year GDP of a single developed European country.
In 2026, the combined capital spending by the four major U.S. tech giants—Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google—on AI infrastructure is projected to exceed $600 billion, a more than 70% surge from last year, with estimates fluctuating between $630 billion and $670 billion.
What does this mean? This amount is roughly equivalent to the annual GDP of Sweden ($662 billion) or Israel ($610 billion).
Based on The Wall Street Journal’s forecast of $670 billion, this total expenditure accounts for about 2.1% of U.S. GDP—second only to the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 (which accounted for 3% of GDP at the time). By comparison, the Apollo moon-landing program represented just 0.2% of GDP, making the moon landing seem like a mere “unit of measurement” next to today’s AI infrastructure investments.
