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Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta Platforms Inc., during the Meta Connect event in Menlo Park, California, US, on Wednesday, Sept. 17, 2025.

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Tech’s internet giants have made it through earnings season, and they offered a consistent message to Wall Street: Artificial intelligence investments are only getting bigger.

Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon each lifted their guidance for capital expenditures and now collectively expect that number to reach more than $380 billion this year.

Microsoft’s forecast was for fiscal 2026, which ends in June.

The companies are racing to build out infrastructure for what they say is virtually limitless demand for AI services.

Meanwhile, a growing number of skeptics are voicing concerns that these historic spending levels are fueling a bubble, and they’re questioning whether there’s sufficient energy and resources to ever turn lofty AI promises into reality.

As big as the spending projections were this week, they look pedestrian when compared with OpenAI, which has announced roughly $1 trillion worth of infrastructure deals of late with partners including Nvidia, Oracle and Broadcom.

Investor reactions to the megacap reports were mixed.

Amazon saw its stock soar after the company beat on earnings and revenue, and said capex this year will be about $125 billion, up from a prior forecast of $118 billion.

“We’ll continue to make significant investments, especially in AI,” finance chief Brian Olsavsky said on the earnings call, adding that the number will grow in 2026. “We believe it to be a massive opportunity with the potential for strong returns on invested capital over the long term.”

Amazon beats on earnings and revenue with strong cloud rebound and bullish Q4 guidance

Investors also cheered Alphabet, which reported an earnings beat and boosted its capex forecast for this year to between $91 billion and $93 billion from a prior range of $75 billion to $85 billion. The stock rose 2.5% on Thursday.

But Microsoft shares fell about 3% even though the software company’s results exceeded estimates.

CFO Amy Hood said on the earnings call that capex growth would accelerate in fiscal 2026, which started in July, after the company had previously said growth would slow. Capex rose 45% to $64.55 billion last fiscal year, suggesting a minimum of about $94 billion in 2026. That number is significantly higher when including leases.

Meta’s stock was hit harder, plummeting 11% on Thursday, its steepest drop in three years, despite an across-the-board beat. The company narrowed its capex guidance to between $70 billion and $72 billion, from a prior range of $66 billion to $72 billion.

‘Unknown revenue opportunity’

Unlike Amazon, Microsoft and Google, Meta doesn’t have a cloud service and lacks a clear revenue story that’s tied to its AI investments.

Meta says its benefits from AI come elsewhere, namely improved performance in its core digital ads business from better targeting.

Still, analysts at Oppenheimer downgraded the stock to the equivalent of a hold from buy, citing an “unknown revenue opportunity” in what the company is calling superintelligence, and said investors will struggle with “aggressive revenue growth offset by high spending.”

Google, by contrast, has “predictable earnings,” the analysts wrote.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced in June the creation of the company’s Superintelligence Labs, and said it would be led by some of his company’s costly high-profile hires, including Scale AI ex-CEO Alexandr Wang and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman.

The lab would house the company’s various teams working on foundation models, Zuckerberg wrote in a memo at the time.

“I’m optimistic that this new influx of talent and parallel approach to model development will set us up to deliver on the promise of personal superintelligence for everyone,” Zuckerberg wrote.

But the Oppenheimer analysts said it’s an approach that “mirrors” the company’s metaverse spending in 2021 and 2022, when Zuckerberg was declaring that platform to be the future of computing.

Meta is still burning billions of dollars a quarter on its investments in augmented reality. The company said in its earnings report that its Reality Labs unit lost $4.4 billion in the quarter on $470 million in revenue.

‘No end in sight’

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella speaks at Microsoft Build AI Day in Jakarta, Indonesia, on April 30, 2024.

Adek Berry | AFP | Getty Images

For the other hyperscalers, investments in AI largely tie into their cloud infrastructure businesses, even as they’re using AI companywide.

Within cloud computing, Amazon Web Services is still bigger than Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud, but it’s growing more slowly than its rivals.

AWS reported revenue growth in the third quarter of 20% to $33 billion. Microsoft said Azure revenue increased by 40%, while Google’s cloud sales rose 34% to $15.15 billion.

Analysts at Cantor said that clouds with “expansive service stacks like Microsoft” are in a position to benefit from this “heightened phase of AI infrastructure build out.”

They recommend buying the stock, but see reasons to be worried about the spending forecast. The analysts said that total capex, which includes capital leases, is poised to reach $140 billion this year, up 58% from a year earlier and triple the figure from 2024.

That number “is reflective of strong demand on the positive side, but remains a concern as there appears no end in sight,” the analysts wrote.

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Gaming billionaire: Prepare for AI to ‘completely disrupt everything’ across the industry

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Gaming billionaire: Prepare for AI to 'completely disrupt everything' across the industry

Min-Liang Tan speaks during a conference at SXSW Sydney on October 16, 2024 in Sydney, Australia.

Nina Franova | Getty Images

Artificial intelligence is set to have a huge impact on the gaming industry and its billions of players, according to Min-Liang Tan, the billionaire CEO and co-founder of gaming firm Razer.

From the ways in which games are developed to hacks for completing levels, Tan said the technology’s ramifications across the sector can’t be overstated.

“For us at Razer, the way we see it is that AI is going to completely disrupt everything, or change everything in gaming,” Tan told CNBC’s “Beyond the Valley” podcast.

Gaming plays a significant role in the creative sector, with 3.6 billion players around the world and annual revenue of nearly $189 billion, according to research company Newzoo, which tracks data across mobile, console and PC games.

Razer changed gaming with its hardware. Now it’s hoping to do the same with AI

“Game developers will now be able to use AI tools, and then you’ve got game publishers that will now distribute, market new games with AI tools … For gamers, the AI tools will be able to change things, in terms of the way they play,” Tan told CNBC’s Arjun Kharpal at Singapore’s SWITCH conference.

Razer, known for its gaming gear like mice, headsets and keyboards, has developed Game Co-AI, a tool that uses computer vision to “watch” how a gamer plays and provides tips on solving quests or defeating enemies. The tool will also use data such as public APIs, and a beta version of Game Co-AI will be available “later in 2025,” according to Razer’s website.

The potential use of AI in esports — or competitive gaming — has sparked debate, however.

“We will not have AI running, I think, during a game itself, but what about at the point of time of training?” Tan said. There is an appetite among some esports players to use AI to help coach future stars, Tan said. “There’s a lot of excitement in respect of this. The opportunities are limitless.”

Along with helping players, AI will also be able to detect and fix bugs when games are developed, according to Tan.

Traditionally, game testing involved “a whole bunch of people sitting in a room,” playing games and identifying bugs one by one, Tan said, in a process known as quality assurance or QA. Razer is developing an AI QA Companion, which can find and log bugs — and will soon also be able to suggest bug fixes, he added.

“[QA] is about 20% to 30% of the [development] costs, it takes up about 30% of the time,” Tan said, adding that the new tool will automate the QA process, making human testers more effective and productive.

AI-created games?

The effects of AI are being felt across industries, but there is still some disagreement on how far AI can go in gaming.

Strauss Zelnick, the CEO of video game publisher Take-Two Interactive, which makes Grand Theft Auto, said on Tuesday that AI can’t rival human game developers.

When asked for his gaming predictions for a year’s time, however, Tan said: “I think we will be talking about some of the new, exciting games that have been built with AI, and how we see the future from that. Maybe we might see one or two major hit games.”

Developing a game usually involves large teams and significant investment, but AI will allow smaller groups of people to do so, according to Tan. Rather than being a threat to jobs, AI can remove “tedious” tasks, he added. “The human creativity still needs to be there.”

The way in which the gaming industry uses AI may have a wider impact beyond the sector, Tan said, suggesting that it could “spawn multiple other new industries.”

“A lot of what’s happening in the tech industry was born from gaming, and I believe that a lot of what will happen for AI will also be born from AI gaming,” he said.

Razer was founded by Tan and Robert Krakoff in 2005, and the company became known for the Boomslang, a mouse — named after a deadly snake — designed specifically for gaming. “For a gamer, the mouse is everything. It’s an extension of your arm,” Tan said. “The more precise your mouse is, the more likely you are going to be able to get frags,” he said, referring to the “kills” made in first-person shooter games.

Headquartered in Singapore and Irvine, California, Tan said the company went global “very quickly” after it launched. Razer went public in 2017, listing on the Hong Kong stock exchange, before going private again in 2022.

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Musk teases Tesla Roadster demo by year-end. He’s been hyping a new one since 2017

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Musk teases Tesla Roadster demo by year-end. He's been hyping a new one since 2017

Toyota Motor Corp President Akio Toyoda gets out of a Tesla Motor’s Roadster electric car with Tesla Motors Chief Exective Officer Elon Musk (behind car) upon their arrival at a news conference in Tokyo November 12, 2010.

Issei Kato | Reuters

Eight years ago, Tesla CEO Elon Musk promoted a next-generation Roadster, basing the name of the sports car on the company’s debut electric vehicle from 2008.

The updated version has yet to hit production. But Musk is again promising that a new one is on the way.

In a discussion with podcaster Joe Rogan that was published on Friday, Musk was asked about the long-delayed vehicle. He provided a sense of timing but declined to share updated technical or design details.

“I can’t do the unveil before the unveil,” Musk said. As he’s said before, Musk claimed the new Roadster “has a shot at being the most memorable product unveil ever.”

Tesla is aiming to show off the updated Roadster to fans and investors “hopefully before the end of the year,” Musk said.

Musk’s comments come a day after former close friend Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, posted on X that he tried to cancel his Roadster reservation from 2018 and get his deposit refunded. He shared a screenshot showing that his email to the company had bounced back.

“I really was excited for the car!” Altman wrote. “And I understand delays. But 7.5 years has felt like a long time to wait.”

Musk, who helped start OpenAI in 2015, is in a heated legal dispute with Altman and now runs competing artificial intelligence startup xAI.

Patrick George, editor-in-chief at InsideEVs and a long-time industry observer, told CNBC on Friday that the Roadster “has been MIA for years.”

“The only thing I can think of that would make Musk start talking about this again is that Sam Altman at OpenAI, who is sort of his arch-rival, just said recently that he was trying to cancel his Roadster reservation which he has held since 2018,” George said.

Earlier this year, the popular gadget and autos reviewer Marques Brownlee discussed the arduous process of cancelling his own Roadster reservation in an interview with Waveform Podcast.

The Roadster is a high end, low-volume model, something meant to challenge vehicles like BYD’s YangWang U9 Xtreme, which was recently crowned the world’s fastest production car.

Musk faces a major Tesla shareholder vote next week, as he and the board are asking investors to approve a massive pay package.

The pay plan would net Musk nearly $1 trillion in Tesla stock and would grow his stake to around 25%, depending on the company hitting various market valuations and other growth milestones.

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Don’t own any Apple? Gear up to buy some if the stock keeps falling

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Don’t own any Apple? Gear up to buy some if the stock keeps falling

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