TOTAL$8.30T Every dollar Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet and Meta spend on capital projects between 2026 and 2035, added together. Not a yearly figure — the whole ten-year pile.
SCRAPPED18% The share of that spending which bought hardware already written off before 2035 arrives. Servers retire on the replacement cycle you set; buildings and power plant are assumed to outlast the window. Watch this fall as you raise growth — a fleet that is still expanding is mostly new.
STANDING$6.81T What is still on the books in 2035: every building and power system, plus the servers bought recently enough not to have been written off yet.
VS LAST DECADE5.9×of $1.4T How the projected ten years compares with what these same four companies actually spent across the previous ten, which totalled $1.40 trillion. That figure is reported history, not a forecast.
INTERSTATES17× The total expressed as multiples of the US Interstate Highway System, which cost about $114bn as built between 1956 and 1992 — roughly $500bn in today's money. A way to picture a number too large to feel.
Live model. "Live" means recomputed, not fetched. Every figure here is calculated in your browser from the three sliders — unlike the bond explainer, this page pulls no external data.
FIELD GUIDEAI INFRASTRUCTURE

Data Centre Spending to 2035

Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet and Meta spent $409 billion on capital projects in their last reported year — 72% more than the year before, and almost a third of everything the four of them have spent in the past decade combined. What the next ten years costs depends on three things: how fast that keeps growing, how much of each dollar buys chips rather than concrete, and how long a chip lasts before it is written off. The four companies do not agree on that last one. Set them yourself.

The model

INPUTS
15%
How fast the $409bn compounds from here. The four grew it 72% last year — a rate nobody expects to hold.
0%40%
70%
Servers, GPUs and networking as a share of the dollar — the rest is land, shell, power and cooling. Alphabet reported roughly 60% on servers in 2025.
60%95%
5.5 yrs
How long a server earns before it is written off. This is not a guess — each company states it. Amazon says 5, Meta 5.5, Microsoft and Alphabet 6.
3 yrs10 yrs
CUMULATIVE CAPEX · 2026 – 2035
$8.30T
Six times what these four spent in the whole of the last decade.
STILL STANDING IN 2035ALREADY SCRAPPED
$12.8Tworking assets $18.0Tspent and gone
AGAINST THE LAST TEN YEARS5.9× OVER
$1.4T actually spent
$0$25T
SCENARIO

Base case

GROWTH15%a year, compounding
CHIP SHARE70%of the dollar by 2035
REFRESH5.5 yrsthen written off

Where the money goes

SPENDING IN 2035
$1.44T
In that year alone, up from $409bn today
ON CHIPS
$5.50T
Servers, GPUs, networking
ON BUILDINGS
$2.80T
Land, shell, power and cooling
CHIP : CONCRETE
$1.96
Chip spend committed per $1 of construction

Sources and method

Where the numbers come from. The base is capital expenditure as reported in each company's own cash flow statement for its most recent completed fiscal year: Amazon $131.8bn and Alphabet $91.4bn (calendar 2025), Microsoft $115.9bn (fiscal year to June 2026), Meta $69.7bn (calendar 2025) — $408.9bn together, against $237.3bn the year before. The $1.40tn comparison is the same four companies' reported capex summed across their ten most recent fiscal years. The replacement cycles are the useful lives each company states for servers and network equipment: Amazon shortened its estimate from six years to five, citing the pace of AI hardware; Meta extended to five and a half; Microsoft and Alphabet both moved from four years to six. The chip-versus-buildings split starts at Alphabet's reported 2025 mix of roughly 60% servers.

What we have assumed. Everything past the base year. Growth, the drift in chip share, and the replacement cycle are yours to set — there is no forecast here, only arithmetic on inputs you choose. Two caveats worth stating plainly: reported capex is total capital expenditure, which for Amazon in particular includes warehouses and delivery infrastructure as well as data centres, so the base overstates pure data-centre spending by an amount none of them disclose; and servers are treated as retiring on the cycle you set while buildings and power plant are assumed to outlast the ten-year window. The Interstate comparison uses ~$500bn, the usual present-day restatement of the system's $114bn 1956–1992 cost. The widely repeated "45×" version of that comparison does not check out against any of these totals, which is why we compute it live rather than quoting it.