Google Lights $185B On Fire In The Name Of AI Spending For 2026 (Because Of Course)

“Who could have possibly seen this coming?” - absolutely no one

Google just backed up the brinks truck to Skynet as Sundar mentioned plans to light $185B on fire spend $185 billion on capex in 2026. During earnings, Google said capex is heading north of $175–185B in 2026, which is more than double what it spent last year. Now is this surprising? No. Especially after the monster quarter Gemini’s (Bard who?) daddy just had.

(Source: Reddit) 

For context, Alphabet printed a clean beat, crossed $400B in annual revenue for the first time ever, cloud ripped nearly +48% YoY, and backlog ballooned to $240B. So naturally, after the announcement… the stock dipped. Why? Because as the test of time has shown us… Wall Street sees big AI spending and immediately breaks out in hives.

(Source: CNBC) 

Case in point: Google is running out of compute. Sundar basically admitted it on the call. When asked what keeps him up at night, he didn’t say regulation, competition, or Apple. He said capacity. Power. Land. Servers. The physical stuff. Translation: demands pull out game is strong, and Google can’t keep up with it. Which is why, roughly 60% of capex is going straight into servers, the rest into data centers and networking. Meanwhile, the AI pissing match is continuing to get stupid expensive.

Meta already told us it’s  dropping up to $135B next year. Microsoft’s still shoveling money into GPUs. And Amazon just dropped a Jeffery Commerce sized check into OpenAI. So yeah… everyone is springint, and nobody wants to be the guy who tapped out early to protect margins. But, but, but… here’s where Google is different. Google’s cloud backlog didn’t double because vibes were good. Customers are already locked in. They’re already waiting. The infrastructure bill is just catching up to reality. In fact, Gemini’s sitting at 750M monthly users while cloud customers are stacking contracts. Spoiler: There’s a reason Apple picked Google as its preferred AI cloud partner. None of that works if the lights flicker.

Meaning, yes… $185B sounds insane. It should. It’s supposed to. So Wall Street can clutch pearls all it wants… but unfortunately, that’s just the way the world works at the moment. That is, until the music stops. Which is still TBD last time I checked. Meaning, keep your eyes on this story and the metric f*k ton of money being thrown around and place your bets accordingly, friends. Until next time… 

At the time of publishing, Stocks.News holds positions in Alphabet (Google), Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple as mentioned in the article.