Google Cloud Trails Azure by $4.6 Billion, but Growth Leverage Remains

Warren Buffett and newly appointed Berkshire Hathaway CEO Greg Abel have plowed tens of billions of dollars into Alphabet, making it one of Berkshire's biggest investments, after Buffett finally bought the stock in the third quarter of 2025 with shares trading around $200. Buffett had long said he missed the opportunity, noting at the 2017 shareholder meeting that he would not bet against Google, and he has acknowledged missing out on a 9,000% gain by not buying sooner. Google initially offered shares to the public at $85 each in 2004, and after a 2014 split into two share classes and a 20-for-1 split in 2022, the split-adjusted price is just $2.125 per share. Buffett said he likes the stock now because Alphabet plans to spend around $200 billion in capital expenditures this year on new data centers and AI servers, a use of capital he sees earning a high cash return. Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said the average payback period on its new servers is less than two years, and roughly half that for Google's custom TPUs, while average five-year customer contracts and a two-year lead time on data center construction mean even a worst-case scenario produces a positive return. With the stock trading for less than 17 times forward earnings expectations, Buffett and Abel could keep buying in the third quarter.

The top five US hyperscalers are projecting a combined capital expenditure of $660 billion to $725 billion for 2026, nearly double their 2025 outlays, as the AI build-out shifts from software to physical infrastructure. Microsoft is guiding for roughly $175 billion in adjusted capital expenditure for both FY2026 and FY2027, with two-thirds of quarterly spend going to short-lived assets like CPUs and GPUs and the rest to long-lived data center infrastructure, and it added 1 gigawatt of capacity in Q3 FY2026, doubling its global footprint in two years. Amazon AWS has raised its 2026 capex guidance to approximately $220 billion, with CEO Andy Jassy saying AI capacity is expected to remain constrained through 2027 and contracted demand extending into 2028. Meta saw profit drop 14% in Q2 2026 despite a 28% revenue increase as its build-out, including a 1 gigawatt data center in Ohio and a Louisiana facility that could scale to 5 gigawatts, compressed margins, while Alphabet raised its 2026 capex guidance to as much as $205 billion and its Google Cloud backlog more than doubled year-over-year to $240 billion. The Stargate joint venture involving Oracle, OpenAI and others targets up to $500 billion in infrastructure investment by 2029, and Oracle's FY2026 capex reached $55.7 billion, more than doubling from the previous year.