谁来为 AI 买单？Microsoft 和 Meta 把资本开支推向新高

This summer, when Wall Street reads Big Tech's earnings, the focus has quietly shifted.

In the past, what people cared about most was "how much did they make"; now, everyone's eyes are fixed on the same line of numbers: how much they spent on AI.

This week it was Microsoft and Meta's turn to hand in their reports, and their answers were almost enough to make you gasp.

Take Microsoft first.

Over the past year, it poured about ninety-seven billion dollars into servers, chips, and data centers.

By its own account, next year that number will climb more than twenty percent, nearing one hundred twenty billion, and the year after could shoot past one hundred seventy billion dollars.

More tellingly, it admits about two-thirds of it goes to "short-lived" chips that have to be replaced in just a few years.

Meta, for its part, isn't pulling back either, raising this year's capital spending to between one hundred thirty and one hundred forty-five billion dollars.

The market broadly expects that next year, this sum will surge almost eighty percent more than this year.

A few years ago, any one of these numbers could have shaken the whole industry; now they have become Big Tech's "new normal."

And the market's attitude has changed too: a company's stock price increasingly depends on "how much it plans to spend," not just "how much it already made."

Sometimes, a surprise number in the spending guidance hits the stock price harder than the profit itself.

Just days ago, Google, because of its runaway AI spending, posted its first negative free cash flow since going public.

Now Microsoft and Meta take the baton, pushing the stakes of this "AI arms race" to a new high.

And the question follows: when several companies all bet hundred-billion-dollar chips at once, if the future they keep promising is slow to come, who is left to foot this astronomical bill?