US tech giants ramp up AI infrastructure spending in July, annual capex plans near $800 billion

In July, US technology giants disclosed their full-year capital expenditure plans, totaling close to $800 billion, with funds flowing mainly into AI servers, data centers, proprietary chips and storage capacity. Early in the month the sector suffered a correction: the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index tumbled 11% in a single week, and nearly 70% of semiconductor stocks retreated more than 20% from their highs. By month-end, earnings announcements sparked a sharp reversal. Microsoft surged 15.51% in one session—its biggest one-day gain since 2008—while the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index jumped 8.19%. Micron, SanDisk and AMD each advanced more than 13% in a single day.

Alphabet, the parent of Google, raised its full-year capex to between $195 billion and $205 billion in mid-July, with Google Cloud’s order backlog exceeding $514 billion. Microsoft kept its $190 billion capex plan; quarterly capital spending reached $41 billion, up 70% year-on-year, all allocated to purchasing GPUs for expanding its Azure computing clusters. After reporting second-quarter results, Meta lifted its full-year capex guidance from $125 billion to a range of $130 billion to $145 billion, with quarterly capital expenditure of $31.08 billion. The company aims to maximize the pace of data-center construction in 2026–2027, pushing forward a $14 billion project in Texas and a $50 billion supercomputing campus in Louisiana. Meta’s second-quarter free cash flow tumbled 91% year-on-year to $784 million, and its shares fell 8% following the earnings release.

Intel released results on July 24, posting quarterly revenue of $16.1 billion, up 25% from a year earlier, with its data-center AI revenue growing 59% year-on-year. It raised its full-year capex to $20 billion and signed ten long-term server CPU supply agreements with cloud providers. Nvidia’s share price weakened in July amid volatile trading, hitting an intraday low of $190 before rebounding along with the broader market to close the month 2.65% higher, leaving its market capitalization at $4.7 trillion. Semiconductor firms including AMD, Micron, Western Digital and Applied Materials all secured substantial long-term orders from hyperscale cloud companies during July. Memory chip makers, benefiting from incremental AI-driven storage demand, rallied collectively late in the month, with SanDisk soaring nearly 26% in a single day.

Apple continued to increase investment in proprietary on-device AI chips while simultaneously locking in long-term supply of memory and advanced chips from upstream suppliers. Tesla in July reiterated its full-year capex of more than $25 billion and brought on-stream its own AI chip factory in Texas, mainly relying on autonomous-driving on-device AI to expand computing power.