A clear trend has emerged in the past few weeks, as one tech giant after another reported their earnings: Big Tech is spending big on artificial intelligence in 2025.
Combined, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet, Google’s parent company, are planning on spending $320 billion this year, with a primary focus on boosting their AI products. That spending represents a 44% increase from last year for those same four companies, signaling the battle for AI supremacy is only growing more heated — and expensive.
Here’s a quick look at what each of those companies plans on spending this year:
— Meta: CEO Mark Zuckerberg said his company, which runs Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, will spend $60 billion to $65 billion in 2025 as it looks to “significantly” expand its AI team and Llama, its linchpin AI model.
— Alphabet: CEO Sundar Pichai said the company behind Google’s Gemini AI model will spend $75 billion this year — a healthy increase from the $60 billion analysts had expected.
— Microsoft: The world’s second-most valuable company plans on spending $80 billion this year, as President Brad Smith recently called this a “golden opportunity for American AI”; Microsoft, of course, is the key investor behind OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT.
— Amazon: CEO Andy Jassy this week said Amazon expects to spend $100 billion this year, with the “vast majority” of that money going to its AI efforts.
It’s also worth noting that Elon Musk’s Tesla — another AI leader that will eventually be releasing its $20,000-$30,000 AI-powered robots — is expected to spend $11 billion this year.
The surge in AI spending comes as the industry has not only grown more competitive at home, but is also facing stiff competition from outside the U.S. DeepSeek, a Chinese AI company, shocked the industry and Wall Street late last month with its latest release, which leaped past ChatGPT on the Apple App Store.
Notably, Apple, the most valuable company in the world, will likely not be spending as much as the other tech giants to beef up its AI efforts. The company, led by CEO Tim Cook, has not yet shared its capital expenditure estimate for 2025, but analysts anticipate Apple will spend around $10 billion to $11 billion this year.
