Via fastcompany.com
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai signals increased AI infrastructure spending, with ripple effects for Nvidia and Broadcom
Google's parent company plans to nearly double its capital expenditure to as much as $185 billion in 2026, sending semiconductor stocks higher
Alphabet just told Wall Street it plans to spend up to $185 billion on infrastructure in 2026. The announcement came during Alphabet’s Q4 2025 earnings call on February 4, where CEO Sundar Pichai and CFO Anat Ashkenazi laid out what amounts to one of the most aggressive capital deployment plans in corporate history.
The numbers behind the buildout
Alphabet’s projected 2026 capital expenditure of $175B to $185B represents a staggering escalation. In 2025, the company spent $91.4B. The year before that, $52.5B. So in the span of two years, Alphabet will have roughly tripled its annual infrastructure budget.
Q4 2025 alone saw $27.9B in capital expenditure. Of that, approximately 60% went toward servers, with the remaining 40% allocated to data centers and networking equipment.
Pichai cited “compute capacity” bottlenecks as a significant operational concern, alongside constraints related to power availability, land acquisition, and supply chain logistics.
AI, tech, and the markets they move—in one daily briefing.
Daily. Free. Join 34,000+ readers across crypto, finance, and policy.
On the revenue side, Google Cloud’s backlog surged 55% quarter-over-quarter to reach $240B, driven by enterprise demand for AI services.
Why Nvidia and Broadcom investors are paying attention
Both Nvidia and Broadcom saw their shares rise in after-hours and premarket trading following the earnings call. Nvidia’s GPUs remain the workhorse of AI training infrastructure, while Alphabet also deploys its own custom TPUs (Tensor Processing Units) for certain workloads. Broadcom supplies networking components and custom silicon that are critical to connecting and orchestrating thousands of processors inside hyperscale data centers.