The ITHome page is timestamped 2026/10/31 23:56:00. The article places a Bloomberg report in the early hours of that same day. It says the construction of AI infrastructure will still draw a very large amount of money. Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Oracle, described there as five large technology companies, have committed more than $3 trillion over the coming years to data centers and related fields. As the data-center buildout has intensified, the lease, building, energy, and equipment-purchase commitments these five companies disclose have grown sharply. Some of that money will be spent in the near term. Some of it sits in long contracts that run for decades.
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Google's spending commitments are described as the largest. The article says that, according to regulatory filings Alphabet submitted, the contract total covering technical equipment, energy, and leases exceeds $1 trillion, close to eight times the level of a year earlier. Meta's future spending has climbed as well, to more than $800 billion. Nearly half of the Meta figure is for data-center leases that have not yet taken effect, with payments spread over as long as 30 years. Susan Li, Meta's chief financial officer, said on an analyst call last week that the company expects to keep investing heavily in support of the core business and of newer AI projects. The article dates that call only as last week.
[1]The article treats the question of whether the investment can be earned back as one of the major business arguments this year. It calls Alphabet and Meta two of the most profitable companies in the world, and it ties the move in their free cash flow from positive to negative to investment in this new business. It then says the five companies' outlays are not all for data centers, the categories they disclose do not match, and a straight comparison is hard. Part of Meta's budget goes to consumer hardware in the Reality Labs division. Planned spending at Alphabet and Amazon includes content-licensing fees. This tally also leaves out existing leases, debt, and other large outlays.
[1]Future lease-payment commitments across the five companies total $1.3 trillion. Other purchase commitments total $1.9 trillion. Except for Microsoft, the figures are taken from each company's latest earnings report. Microsoft's purchase orders and construction orders come from the annual report through the end of June, and the company has not updated those two lines since. Oracle is described as the first large technology company whose free cash flow turned negative because of investment in AI data centers. The investor presentation, in the article's wording, was held earlier this week. Oracle expects free cash flow to turn positive again by 2028. It also plans to use supplier financing and customer prepayments so that less cash has to be put up by the company itself at the start of a project.
[1]The picture is the photograph used with that Bloomberg report. It shows a data center, and the credit line is Rodrigo Arangua / AFP / Getty Images. The ITHome page does not carry the photograph. A total above $3 trillion is a sum of commitments, not cash already spent. The article gives no link to the Bloomberg piece and no link to the five regulatory filings. Placing the report in the early hours of 31 October is the article's own timing. It does not reproduce the filings, so the dollar figures stay a relayed tally. Microsoft's two order lines stop at the end of June, so they do not share a cutoff date with the latest reports of the other four companies. Renminbi conversions printed on the page are left out.
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