Alphabet's Cash Burn Sparks Alarm as Big Tech AI Spending Soars
Alphabet's cash burn raises alarm for Big Tech as AI spending climbs
Alphabet recorded its first-ever cash burn of $5.9 billion in the second quarter, driven by massive AI investments despite record growth in Google Cloud. This trend signals a broader shift for Big Tech, where companies like Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon are increasingly relying on debt to fund soaring capital expenditures. Investors now face the critical question of whether AI revenue can outpace the relentless spending required to stay competitive.
Investors will increasingly focus on how much of that cash must be reinvested simply to remain competitive — and whether AI revenue can grow faster than capital expenditure, depreciation and operating costs.
- tedggh
The current commitment by hyperscalers is around 1.7T USD, reported liabilities 1.3T and this year global debt related to AI is 570B. So that’s around 3T total. For this to make sense AI must generate 2T in new revenue per year by the end of the decade. And that would be only a 10% ROIC. For context ROIC for big tech is around 35% so at 10% they will be barely breaking even. The SP500 gives 10-12%. With 10% ROIC from AI the only thing investors will be celebrating is that the whole thing didn’t trigger a financial crisis. Data centers are NOT real estate. Buildings and power lines usually last 30-50 years. GPUs become obsolete in 5 years. If hyperscalers need to refinance and their interest rate goes up there’s zero margin for error.
- epistasis
I'm thinking Apple has been really smart in their AI strategy here.
It seems a mistake to make unprecedentedly large capital expenditures, in a very very crowded space, without much evidence of a moat. Presumably people thought the moat would be singularity-like self-improvement of AI, but the singularity is merely a religious concept, and nobody should take religious myth as fact, it's merely narrative for orientation and inspiration.
- Zigurd
Looking at cash burn is looking at the wrong end of the horse. Some companies, like Meta, have burned huge piles of cash in pursuit of, for example, the Metaverse and they've got nothing to show for it, not even a slight increment in ad tech, and yet they earned enough to shrug it off.
There's a big difference between Google spending tens of billions on AI infrastructure and what Oracle is doing. Oracle is spending to get on a bandwagon. Google is transforming their business, so far seemingly correctly. If AI flops big-time, Google will be left with some stranded assets, but it won't be existential the way it would be to Oracle.
- gavin_gee
i dont understand the concern. they are putting up great financials. you have to invest ahead of the outcome. this is just classic quarterly public company earnings BS, where public markets dont reward innovation investment. they just want crank the handle financials.
The bigger issue is on the model front, can Google compete; Gemini doesnt seem to be able to compete on the heavy expert end; they are doing well on lighter faster models.
- narrator
All these big tech companies are fighting over the basics eventually like power and transformers and don't like to do anything dirty that would hurt their ESG score like getting into any sort of industrial business. Thus, the default is all that stuff that heavily bottlenecks American AI gets done in China.
If you listen to Tesla's recent conference call they are going to making solar panels all the way back to making the silicon ingots and totally vertically integrate. Elon lamented on a previous call that nobody wants to get involved in these primary industries and he has to do it all himself unless he puts his whole supply chain in China. For example, Tesla recently opened a state of the art lithium refinery in Texas cause nobody outside of China does that anymore. He's opening a new fab, because everyone else is too hesitant to expand to meet the capacity he needs.
- Centigonal
They just raised $85 billion and they're sitting on a mountain of cash - if their spending didn't increase in this context, it'd be bad management. The real story here is that they have decided to spend that mountain of cash on AI CapEx.
- paxys
These alarms have been going off for a long time now. Everyone is already in too deep to admit that there’s a problem.
- seydor
Haven't they announced the spending like, years ago? Is the market deaf and blind now too?