There's a fear in investing when a sector swells rapidly. Booming stock prices and aggressive spending feel great, until things inevitably cool off. Then comes the reckoning: Who overdid it in irreversible ways?
Big Tech is in an AI arms race, each company trying to outspend the others on data centers, GPUs, networking gear, and talent. Engineers can be let go. But the infrastructure? That's permanent. If the AGI dream fades, you're stuck with massive, costly assets.
So when Google announced it would hike capex by $10 billion to $85 billion in 2025 eyebrows went up. Most of it is for things you can't walk back: chips, data centers, and networking.
Google is "jumping aboard the AI crazy train," Bernstein Research analyst Mark Shmulik wrote, referencing a song by the late bat biter Ozzy Osbourne.
Meta's Mark Zuckerberg brags about Manhattan-sized data centers. And Elon Musk keeps hoarding GPUs. While Sam Altman is building mega-data centers with partners. JPMorgan dubbed this "vibe spending," warning OpenAI might burn $46 billion in four years.
It's no shock when Elon, Zuck, and Sam flex on capex. But Google? That's surprising. "Google doesn't do this," Shmulik said. The company has been viewed as measured in recent years, prioritizing investment intensity with care. Not anymore.
Now investors want to know: Will these swelling bets pay off?
There are promising signs. Since May, Google's monthly token processing (the currency of generative AI) has doubled from 480 trillion to nearly a quadrillion. Search grew 12% in Q2, beating forecasts. Cloud sales surged 32%. CEO Sundar Pichai said Google is ramping up capex to support all this growth.
But it's still a huge gamble. "Does the current return on invested capital seen in both Search and Cloud hold up at higher [capex] intensity levels," Shmulik asked, "or is the spend a very expensive piece of gum trying to plug an AI-sized hole?" He leans optimistic.
Still, Google shares rose just 1% after these results. Not exactly a resounding endorsement.
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