Alphabet's quarterly cash capital expenditure has roughly tripled in two years, from $12.01 billion in the first quarter of 2024 to $35.67 billion in the first quarter of 2026
The figure is Alphabet's purchases of property and equipment in its cash-flow statement: $35,674 million in the first quarter of 2026, up from $17,197 million a year earlier. Alphabet says the spending mainly reflected technical infrastructure, and that about 60% of those assets are servers and network equipment.
Verified 2026-08-03
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Alphabet's spending on data centres and equipment has climbed steeply as it builds for AI.
- Price
- $300.10
- 30D
- -15.31%
- AI share of revenue
- Not disclosed
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More on Capital
- While Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Alphabet and Oracle have all sharply increased AI capital spending, Apple's cash paid for property, plant and equipment in the nine months to 27 June 2026 actually fell, to Apple's nine-month capex of $6.8 billion, down 28% from $9.47 billion a year earlier
- A Brookings Papers draft by Columbia's Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh projects that the US AI build-out of 2025 to 2032 will absorb, every year, 3.63% of GDP, versus 2.24% for the railroads of 1870–1890
- Global private investment in AI reached $344.7 billion in 2025, up 127.5% year-over-year, with generative AI companies alone capturing $170.9 billion of that total
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