By Jeremy Bowman
Publication Date: 2026-02-06 03:30:00
Alphabet is doubling its capex spend to $175 billion-$185 billion this year.
Alphabet (GOOG 0.60%) (GOOGL 0.20%) delivered solid results across the board in its fourth-quarter earnings report on Wednesday night. However, after the stock had doubled in the last six months, it wasn’t enough to keep the rally going, especially as the AI trade has come under pressure in recent weeks.
Alphabet beat estimates on the top and bottom lines, but investors were wary of its aggressive capital expenditure plans in 2026 to fuel its AI ambitions.
The Google parent said it planned to spend $175 billion-$185 billion in capex this year, which is double what it spent last year.
While that level of spending adds risks for Alphabet, there is at least one big winner from the move: Nvidia (NVDA 1.35%), the dominant maker of data-center GPUs to run AI applications.
Image source: Getty Images.
Where the $175 billion is going
Alphabet management touted the return from investments it’s already made in AI, and it plans to step up investing in AI compute to “support frontier model development by Google DeepMind,” meaning cutting-edge AI that likely requires Nvidia hardware, in addition to improvements in core businesses like advertising.
Management also called out Nvidia as a key partner, and said it would be among the first to get access to Nvidia’s new Vera Rubin GPU platform.
That’s also a reminder that for all of the talk about big tech companies like Alphabet challenging Nvidia with its TPUs,…
