Tech Giants Plan Massive $320 Billion AI Spend for 2025

America’s tech giants could reportedly spend more than $320 billion on artificial intelligence (AI) this year.

AI investments by the four biggest tech firms — Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft — jumped 63% last year, and will jump again for 2025, the Financial Times (FT) reported Friday (Feb. 7).

However, the report added, investors are concerned that upping spending on AI without seeing a corresponding uptick in revenue will rob companies of capital that could otherwise go to buybacks and dividends, while hamstringing non-AI business lines.

“The unbridled enthusiasm across the entire ‘Magnificent Seven’ has been replaced by pockets of skepticism and created some ‘show me’ situations,” Jim Tierney, head of the concentrated U.S. growth fund at AllianceBernstein, told the FT. “The concerns that I’ve had since summer are magnified today.”

Executives at these companies, the report said, are pledging to up their investments in AI, pushing aside worries about the massive amounts they’re spending on the technology.

The four companies, the FT added, have reported combined capital expenditure of $246 billion in 2024, up from $151 billion the year before. That figure could surpass $320 billion in 2025 as companies embark on — as Microsoft President Brad Smith said in a recent blog post — a new industrial revolution.

“However, AI requires hefty investments,” PYMNTS wrote recently. “Training large language models uses thousands of GPUs (each Nvidia GPU costs about $10,000 or more) or specialized AI chips for a total of tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. Running these AI models at scale also requires high-performance data centers, which need more servers and require more cooling and maintenance.”

In addition, that report added, there’s the cost of acquiring and preparing big datasets, six-figure salaries for AI researchers and engineers, continual research and development, regulatory compliance, and other expenditures.

As the FT noted, the size of companies’ AI ambitions — announced with their recent earnings — has surprised the market and worsened a stock selloff triggered following the release of Chinese startup DeepSeek’s AI model last month.

Both Google and Microsoft saw $200 billion in market value wiped out after reporting softer-than-anticipated growth in their cloud divisions and sharp increases in capital spending, the report added.

Meanwhile, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy spent some time on last week’s earnings call to discuss his impressions of DeepSeek.

“For those of us who are building frontier models, we’re all working on the same types of things, and we’re all learning from one another,” he said. “I think you have seen and will continue to see a lot of leapfrogging between us. There is a lot of innovation to come.”