Big tech is spending big on data centers — which means it’s also spending big on power.
Alphabet, the parent company of Google, announced Wednesday that it expects to spend $175 billion to $185 billion on capital expenditures this year. That estimate is about double what it spent in 2025, far north of Wall Street’s expected $121 billion, and somewhere between the gross domestic products of Ecuador and Morocco.
This is a “a massive investment in absolute terms,” Jefferies analyst Brent Thill wrote in a note to clients Thursday. “Jarringly large,” Guggenheim analyst Michael Morris wrote. With this announcement, total expected capital expenditures by Alphabet, Microsoft and Meta for 2026 are at $459 billion, according to Jefferies calculations — roughly the GDP of South Africa. If Alphabet’s spending comes in at the top end of its projected range, that would be a third larger than the “total data center spend across the 6 largest players only 3 years ago,” according to Brian Nowak, an analyst at Morgan Stanley.
And that was before Thursday, when Amazon told investors that it expects to spend “about $200 billion” on capital expenditures this year.
For Alphabet, this growth in capital expenditure will fund data center development to serve AI demand, just as it did last year. In 2025, “the vast majority of our capex was invested in technical infrastructure, approximately 60% of that investment in servers, and 40% in data centers and networking equipment,” chief financial officer Anat Ashkenazi said on the company’s earnings call.
The ramp up in data center capacity planned by the tech giants necessarily means more power demand. Google previewed its immense power needs late last year when it acquired the renewable developer Intersect for almost $5 billion.
When asked by an analyst during the company’s Wednesday earnings call “what keeps you up at night,” Alphabet chief executive Sundar Pichai said, “I think specifically at this moment, maybe the top question is definitely around capacity — all constraints, be it power, land, supply chain constraints. How do you ramp up to meet this extraordinary demand for this moment?”
One answer is to contract with utilities to build. The utility and renewable developer NextEra said during the company’s earnings call last week that it plans to bring on 15 gigawatts worth of power to serve datacenters over the next decade, “but I'll be disappointed if we don't double our goal and deliver at least 30 gigawatts through this channel by 2035,” NextEra chief executive John Ketchum said. (A single gigawatt can power about 800,000 homes).
The largest and most well-established technology companies — the Microsofts, the Alphabets, the Metas, and the Amazons — have various sustainability and clean energy commitments, meaning that all sorts of clean power (as well as a fair amount of natural gas) are likely to get even more investment as data center investment ramps up.
Jefferies analyst Julien Dumoulin-Smith described the Alphabet capex figure as “a utility tailwind,” specifically calling out NextEra, renewable developer Clearway Energy (which struck a $2.4 billion deal with Google for 1.2 gigawatts worth of projects earlier this year), utility Entergy (which is Google’s partner for $4 billion worth of projects in Arkansas), Kansas-based utility Evergy (which is working on a data center project in Kansas City with Google), and Wisconsin-based utility Alliant (which is working on data center projects with Google in Iowa).
If getting power for its data centers keeps Pichai up at night, there’s no lack of utility executives willing to answer his calls.
