Sometimes, it can seem like the AI industry is racing to see who can spend the most money on data centers. Whoever builds the most data centers will have the most compute, the thinking goes, and thus be able to build the best AI products, which will guarantee victory in the years to come. There are limits to this way of thinking — traditionally, businesses eventually succeed by making more money and spending less — but it’s proven remarkably persuasive for large tech companies.

If that is the game, Amazon does seem to be winning.

The company announced in its earnings on Thursday that it projects $200 billion in capital expenditures throughout 2026, across “AI, chips, robotics, and low earth orbit satellites.” That’s up from the $131.8 billion in capex in 2025. It’s tempting to attribute the whole capex budget to AI. But unlike most of its competitors, Amazon has a significant physical plant, some of which is being converted for use by expensive robots, so the non-AI expenses aren’t so easy to wave away.

Google is close behind. In its earnings on Wednesday, the company projected between $175 billion and $185 billion in capital expenditures for 2026, up from $91.4 billion the previous year. It’s significantly more than the company spent on fixed assets last year, and significantly more than most of its competitors are spending.

Meta, which reported last week, projected $115 billion to $135 billion in capex spending for 2026, while Oracle (once the poster child for AI infrastructure) projects a measly $50 billion. Microsoft doesn’t have an official projection for 2026 yet, but the most recent quarterly figure was $37.5 billion, which pencils out to roughly $150 billion, assuming it keeps up. It’s a notable increase, and one that has led to investor pressure on CEO Satya Nadella — but it still puts the company in third place.

From within the tech world, the logic here is simple. The revolutionary potential of AI is going to turn high-end compute into the scarce resource of the future, and only companies that control their own supply will survive. But while Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Oracle, and others are frantically prepping for the compute desert of the future, their investors aren’t convinced. Each company saw its stock price plummet as investors balked at the hundreds of billions of dollars being committed, and companies with higher spends tended to drop more.

Crucially, this isn’t just a problem for companies like Meta that haven’t figured out their AI product strategy yet. It’s everyone — even companies like Microsoft and Amazon with a robust cloud business and a straightforward take on how to make money in the AI era. The numbers are simply too high for investor comfort.

Investor sentiment isn’t everything — and in this case, it may not do much to change the industry’s mind. If you believe AI is about to change everything (and the argument is pretty compelling at this point), you’d be a fool to change course just because Wall Street got jumpy. But going forward, Big Tech companies will be under a lot of pressure to downplay how expensive their AI ambitions really are.

Amazon Web Services ended 2025 with its strongest quarterly growth rate in more than three years.

The company reported Thursday that its cloud service business recorded $35.6 billion in revenue in the fourth quarter of 2025. This figure marks a 24% year-on-year increase and the business segment’s largest growth rate in 13 quarters. Annual revenue run rate for the business segment is $142 billion, according to Amazon. The cloud service also saw an increase in its operating income from $12.5 billion in the fourth quarter compared to $10.6 billion in the same period in 2024.

“It’s very different having 24% year-over-year growth on $142 billion annualized run rate than to have a higher percentage growth on a meaningfully smaller base, which is the case with our competitors,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said during the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call. “We continue to add more incremental revenue and capacity than others, and extend our leadership position.”

That fourth-quarter growth was fueled by new agreements with Salesforce, BlackRock, Perplexity, and the U.S. Air Force, among other companies and government entities.

“More of the top 500 U.S. startups use AWS as their primary cloud provider than the next two providers combined,” Jassy said. “We’re adding significant easy to core computing capacity each day.”

AWS also added more than a gigawatt of power to its data center network in the fourth quarter.

Jassy said AWS still sees a fair amount of its business coming from enterprises that want to move infrastructure from on-premise to the cloud. AWS is, of course, also seeing a boost from the AI boom, and Jassy credited AWS’s top-to-bottom AI stack functionality.

“We consistently see customers wanting to run their AI workloads where the rest of their applications and data are,” Jassy said. “We’re also seeing that as customers run large AI workloads on AWS, they’re adding to their core AWS footprint as well.”

AWS made up 16.6% of Amazon’s overall $213.4 billion revenue in the fourth quarter.

AWS’s success wasn’t enough to appease Amazon investors, however. Amazon shares fell 10% in after-hours trading after investors reacted to the company’s plan to boost capital expenditures and missed Wall Street’s expectations on earnings per share.

Reddit suggested on Thursday that its AI-powered search engine could be the next big opportunity for its business — not just in terms of product, but also as a revenue driver impacting its bottom line. During the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call on Thursday, it offered an update on its plans to merge traditional and AI search together and hinted that although search is not yet monetized, “it’s an enormous market and opportunity.”

In particular, the company believes that generative AI search will be “better for most queries.”

“There’s a type of query we’re, I think, particularly good at — I would argue, the best on the internet — which is questions that have no answers, where the answer actually is multiple perspectives from lots of people,” said Reddit CEO Steve Huffman.

Traditional search, meanwhile, is more like navigation — it’s a way to find the right link to a topic or subreddit. But LLMs can be good at this, too, if not better, he said. “So that’s the direction we’re going.”

The exec also noted that weekly active users for search over the past year grew 30% from 60 million users to 80 million users. Meanwhile, the weekly active users for the AI-powered Reddit Answers grew from 1 million in the first quarter of 2025 to 15 million by the fourth quarter.

“We’re seeing a lot of growth there, and I think there’s a lot of potential too,” Huffman added.

Reddit said it’s working to modernize the AI answers interface by making its responses more media-rich, and pilots of this are already underway.

The company is also thinking about how it can position itself when it’s not just a social site, but a place people come for answers. Reddit told investors on the call that it’s doing away with the distinction between logged-in and logged-out users starting in Q3 2026, as it will aim to personalize the site — using AI and machine learning — and make it relevant to whoever shows up.

The company announced in 2025 it was planning to combine its AI search feature, Reddit Answers, with its traditional search engine to improve the experience for end users. In the fourth quarter, Reddit said it had made “significant progress” in unifying its core search and its AI feature. It also released five new languages on Reddit Answers and is piloting dynamic agents along with search results that include “media beyond text.”

Though Reddit sees value in its AI answers, it’s not been keeping that to itself. The company’s content licensing business, which allows other companies to train their AI models on its data, is growing, too. That business revenue is reported as part of Reddit’s “other” revenues (i.e., its non-ad revenue). This “other” revenue increased by 8% year-over-year to reach $36 million in Q4 and was up 22% to reach $140 million for 2025.