Big Tech's Big Four Pour $500 Billion Into Capital Spending in Nine Months
The four major US Big Tech companies spent more on capital investment in the first nine months of this year than they did in all of last year. The competition to gain an early foothold in the artificial intelligence (AI) market underpins this massive spending, which is also having a significant impact on global stock markets.
According to an aggregation of filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta spent a combined $496.7 billion on a cash basis from January to September this year, surpassing last year's annual total of $376.1 billion in just nine months. In particular, roughly $201.9 billion was spent in the July-September quarter alone, up 108% from about $97.3 billion in the same period last year. For the third quarter, Amazon led with $77.3 billion, followed by Alphabet with $51.4 billion, Microsoft with $39.4 billion, and Meta with $33.9 billion. These figures cover each company's total tangible asset investments rather than AI-specific spending alone, but the expansion of technology infrastructure such as AI servers, semiconductors, and data centers is behind the surge.
Despite the massive investments, user bases vary widely across services. In an October survey of global web traffic to seven major AI chatbots based on Similarweb data, ChatGPT accounted for 56.6%, followed by Google's Gemini at 24.7%, Anthropic's Claude at 11.7%, and China's DeepSeek at 3.5%. ChatGPT's monthly web visits came to about 6.05 billion, 4.8 times Claude's roughly 1.25 billion. However, Claude grew rapidly, with traffic up 24% from the previous month. The survey is based on web traffic only and does not include mobile app usage or enterprise API use.
User scale does not necessarily correspond to company valuations. OpenAI secured $11 billion in new funding on the 6th, valuing the company at $1.25 trillion. Its rival Anthropic is being discussed at a value of about $1.5 trillion in its IPO process, though this is neither a confirmed offering price nor an actual market capitalization upon listing.
According to Chinese market research firm QuestMobile, ByteDance's Doubao had 419 million monthly active users in September. Alibaba's Qwen was counted at 158 million and DeepSeek at 123 million. Even though DeepSeek has drawn technical attention, Doubao has built a far larger presence in China's consumer market.
Semiconductors are the most direct channel through which the US-China AI rivalry reaches the South Korean stock market. Training and operating large-scale AI models requires GPUs, high-bandwidth memory (HBM), and server DRAM. Expanded data center investment by US cloud companies affects not only Nvidia but also the memory businesses of Samsung Electronics and SK hynix. With both the US and China expanding AI infrastructure investment on the back of massive consumer markets, this competition is simultaneously creating new opportunities and risks for South Korea's Samsung Electronics and SK hynix.
