RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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See the full story · 1 sourcesAI has turbocharged an already expanding cloud services market as organizations pour billions into online platforms offering the compute needed to train and run models, swelling the coffers of the established giants. Their latest results show revenue surging alongside capital spending as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft race to add capacity – at least until the AI bubble eventually bursts, of course. Biggest of them all, Amazon disclosed that its Amazon Web Services (AWS) division took in $42.2 billion during its second quarter, ended June 30, 2026. This was an increase of 36.7 percent year-on-year and its fifth consecutive quarter of accelerating growth. It seems like even CEO Andy Jassy could scarcely believe the cloud operator's fortunes, boasting that "AWS is now a $169 billion annualized revenue run rate business, which, for perspective, would place it 24th on the Fortune 500 list if it was a standalone company." Amazon is now upping its forecast for how much capex it will spend this year on expanding its infrastructure, including that needed for those AI workloads. "Earlier this year, we said we plan to invest approximately $200 billion in cash capex in 2026, the majority of which to support AI and AWS," Jassy told analysts on a conference call about its financials. "We now believe we will spend approximately $220 billion in cash capex in 2026, with the higher cost of memory pushing this number up from our prior estimate of about $200 billion. But even at that amount, we will still not have enough capacity to meet all the demand we have in 2026, and I believe this dynamic will also be true in 2027 too." "We've done this before in the first era of cloud computing, just over a longer time horizon, where demand built more gradually than it has with AI. But we see the margins and returns in AI tracking what we saw with core at the same point of evolution," Jassy claimed. Google is likewise upping its capex estimates for this year, coming close to Amazon's own massive investments. "We are updating our full year 2026 capex guidance range to $195 to 205 billion, up from our previous estimate of $180 billion to $190 billion. The increase in the range is primarily due to an acceleration in the delivery of capacity to meet growing demand," said Google and Alphabet's chief financial officer, Anat Ashkenazi, during its Q2 earnings call. The company expects this figure to rise significantly again next year, although it declined to be more specific at this stage. "In terms of expenses, the significant increase in our investments and technical infrastructure will continue to put pressure on profit and loss in the form of higher depreciation expense and related datacenter operations costs, such as energy. We also expect to continue hiring in key investment areas such as AI and cloud, and we are investing in marketing to support our AI products," Ashkenazi added. Cloud revenues at the Chocolate Factory were up 82 percent to $24.8 billion for the quarter, driven primarily by GCP, which grew faster than cloud overall, with Core GCP, AI solutions, and AI infrastructure all proving important drivers of growth, according to Ashkenazi. Despite the massive sums involved, she claimed in response to a question that Google just cannot add capacity fast enough. "While we have increased our capacity quite significantly over the past three years, the demand still outpaces that investment. And we are, just like the rest of the industry, working in a supply‑constrained environment, so we're working hard to do this." Microsoft reported commercial cloud revenue of $59.3 billion for the quarter ended June 30 (Q4 FY26), an increase of 27 percent over the same period last year, while revenue from Azure and other cloud services grew 43 percent. Microsoft put its expected calendar 2026 capex at approximately $175 billion, about $15 billion below the earlier figure. The change does not reflect a reduction in its planned infrastructure build-out, however, but a shift in accounting treatment as more future datacenter leases are classified as operating rather than finance leases. "Effective at the start of FY27, we are extending the estimated useful lives of our datacenters and office buildings, from 15 to 25 years, reflecting our operating history and expected use of these assets," explained EVP and CFO Amy Hood. "Outside of this useful life impact, our calendar year 2026 capex investment expectations remain unchanged. However, the shift from finance to operating leases adjusts our expectation to approximately $175 billion." More of Redmond's future datacenter leases will shift from finance leases to operating leases as a result of this update. Hood said Microsoft expects capex during the next quarter, Q1 FY27, to exceed $50 billion, including that lease reclassification impact from the useful life update. On paper, those forecasts add up to roughly $595 billion. They are not directly comparable, however: Amazon cites cash capex across several businesses, Alphabet's guidance covers the whole company, and Microsoft's figure reflects its treatment of leases as well as direct expenditure. Even with those caveats, the figures illustrate the extraordinary sums being committed to infrastructure as the cloud giants chase AI demand. Memory, GPUs, and even hard disks are all in short supply because of it, with shipments of PCs and smartphones falling because in many cases the makers simply cannot secure adequate supplies of memory to meet customer demand. It could be argued that one factor in cloud services growth is that enterprises are struggling to get the hardware they need to build out their own infrastructure, so are forced to turn to the cloud. AWS chief Andy Jassy made the same claim earlier this year, saying that shortages are "a further impetus pushing companies who have on-premises infrastructure into the cloud" as "suppliers are prioritizing their very largest customers, which cloud providers are." As Synergy Research r...
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