AI infrastructure competition continues to heat up Google (GOOGL.US), Meta (META.US), Microsoft (MSFT.US), and Amazon (AMZN.US) promise total future investments approaching 2.4 trillion US dollars

The Zhitong Finance App learned that as artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure construction continues to accelerate, Google's parent company Alphabet (GOOGL.US), Meta (META.US), Microsoft (MSFT.US), and Amazon (AMZN.US) have made total investment commitments over the next few years close to 2.4 trillion US dollars, indicating that the global data center construction boom is still heating up rapidly.

Over the past year, the four companies mentioned above have all significantly increased investment in data centers, including leasing, construction, energy supply, and equipment procurement. These commitments cover both future short-term capital expenditure and long-term contracts spanning decades.

Among them, Alphabet recently revealed that up to now, the total amount of the company's unfulfilled procurement commitments, contractual obligations, and leasing agreements that have not yet begun execution has reached 902 billion US dollars, an increase of more than 9 times over a year ago. According to regulatory documents, these commitments mainly include projects such as technical equipment procurement, energy supply, and data center leasing.

Meta's investment commitments have also risen sharply, with the company disclosing future spending commitments of close to $700 billion, an increase of more than eight times over the same period last year. About half of these are data center lease agreements that have yet to be implemented, and some leases can last up to 30 years.

In recent years, one of the biggest disputes surrounding AI in the tech industry is whether investing hundreds of billions of dollars to build AI servers and data centers can ultimately bring sufficient returns. As capital expenditure support continues to rise, Alphabet and Amazon have successively experienced negative free cash flow, and the market anticipates that Meta's free cash flow may soon be under pressure. However, when financial reports were announced recently, several companies further raised or maintained high-level capital expenditure plans, believing that demand for AI computing power is still strong, and it is necessary to continue to expand infrastructure investment.

It is worth noting that not all of the future promises disclosed by various companies are directly used for data center construction, and there are certain differences in statistical caliber. Meta, for example, said that some of the future expenses will be used for consumer-grade hardware products in the Reality Labs division; Alphabet and Amazon also include long-term contracts such as content copyright licenses into future commitments, so data between different companies cannot be completely directly compared.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said that the company is currently going through a stage similar to the early development of AWS, that is, laying the foundation for future business growth through large-scale investment in infrastructure construction in the early stages. He believes that even if the company's capital expenditure is expected to reach 220 billion US dollars this year, it will not be enough to meet the market's demand for cloud computing infrastructure.

According to financial reports, AWS's second-quarter revenue increased 37% year over year, the fastest growth rate since the end of 2021. Jassy said that the strong growth in the AWS business proves that the company continues to increase AI infrastructure construction in response to real and rapidly growing market demand, rather than investing ahead of schedule.