Over the past two weeks, the four companies outlined capital spending of more than $740 billion this year, which Wall Street is reading largely as money for data centers and AI chips.
Alphabet fell 12% on Thursday, its worst day on record, erasing about $500 billion in market value, and dropped again on Friday.
Alphabet reported negative free cash flow of $9.1 billion in the third quarter, its second straight quarter in the red, as quarterly capex rose to $51.4 billion.
It expects to spend up to $205 billion this year and more in 2027, while AI Mode, its AI chatbot feature inside Search, is eating into the search business that funds it.
Amazon posted negative free cash flow of $42.4 billion over the past 12 months, versus $14.8 billion positive the year before, and expects $220 billion in capex this year.
Its stock fell 7% despite 39% revenue growth at AWS, its cloud unit.
Meta reported negative free cash flow of $2.1 billion for the quarter and said its free personal AI agent Muse is very compute-intensive to run; its stock fell 10% last week.
Microsoft was the exception, with $18.6 billion in positive free cash flow and capex of $45.2 billion, below its $50 billion projection. It said the shortfall was not a deliberate pullback but resulted from capacity delays at third-party providers, and shares of smaller companies that rent out AI computing power sank. S&P Global Market Intelligence says Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Oracle raised a combined $326 billion in debt in 2026, triple last year's total. The mood could complicate Anthropic's IPO, filed earlier this week, since its growth depends on securing large amounts of computing power. The Financial Times reported that Blackstone warned investors Anthropic might not earn an investment-grade rating after going public, which could leave it more dependent on hyperscalers and third parties to fund its infrastructure.
