Story cards stay below the sticky dock while audio, chapters, date, and brief navigation remain accessible.
Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft are now projecting combined 2026 capital expenditures of up to $725 billion — a 77% increase over last year's record $410 billion. Rising memory chip prices account for roughly $25 billion of the increase, but the rest is pure demand-driven buildout. All four hyperscalers reported earnings this week and not one blinked on AI spending.
Alphabet reported Q1 revenue of $109.9 billion (up 22%) with net income of $62.6 billion (up 81%). Google Cloud hit $20 billion in quarterly revenue with 32.9% operating margin. CEO Sundar Pichai said the company is "compute constrained" and raised full-year capex guidance to $180–190 billion, noting cloud revenue would have been higher if they could meet demand.
Microsoft posted $82.9 billion in revenue (up 18%) with AI annual recurring revenue surpassing $37 billion, up 123% year-over-year. Azure grew 40%, beating expectations. Microsoft 365 Copilot crossed 20 million paid seats. The company expects full-year capex of $190 billion, with $25 billion attributed to rising component costs.
OpenAI and AWS announced a major expansion bringing GPT-5.5, Codex, and a new Bedrock Managed Agents service to Amazon's cloud platform. This follows the dissolution of OpenAI's exclusivity deal with Microsoft and turns the AI cloud race into a genuine three-way fight between Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. All three services launched in limited preview on April 28.
Google reached an agreement allowing the Department of Defense to use Gemini AI systems on classified networks for "any lawful government purpose." Hundreds of employees signed a letter urging CEO Pichai to refuse the deal. The contract includes vague guardrails against domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons but gives Google no veto over how the government uses the models. Google joins OpenAI and xAI in Pentagon AI partnerships.
Meta confirmed May 20 as the start of an 8,000-person layoff (10% of workforce), with 6,000 open roles also canceled. The company is reorganizing all engineering into "AI pods" — capability-oriented units that ship across surfaces rather than owning a product. New role titles include "AI builder," "AI pod lead," and "AI org lead." Meta's AI infrastructure spend is projected at $115–135 billion this year.
CNBC reports an accelerating wave of departures from major AI labs. Ex-DeepMind researcher David Silver raised a record $1.1 billion seed round for Ineffable Intelligence. Yann LeCun's AMI Labs raised $1 billion after he left Meta. VCs have poured $18.8 billion into AI startups founded since early 2025, on pace to surpass last year's $27.9 billion. Narrowing commercial focus at the big labs is cited as the primary driver.
Rogo, the agentic AI platform for investment banking, closed a $160 million Series D led by Kleiner Perkins with participation from Sequoia, Thrive, and Khosla, bringing total funding past $300 million. Over 35,000 finance professionals at 250+ institutions use its AI agent Felix for deal screening, CIM generation, and diligence workflows. A strong signal that vertical AI in regulated industries is scaling.
The European Commission, Council, and Parliament walked out of a 12-hour Strasbourg trilogue on April 28 with no agreement on the Omnibus simplification package. The August 2, 2026 high-risk compliance deadline remains unchanged, meaning companies deploying AI in hiring, performance evaluation, and termination must comply regardless. Brussels continues to stall while the industry it's trying to regulate accelerates.
In a week where Microsoft, Meta, and Google all announced billions more in AI capex, Fortune reports that only Google persuaded Wall Street the returns are materializing. Google Cloud's 63% revenue growth and 33% margins provided concrete ROI evidence. Microsoft's beat was solid but Azure growth decelerated from prior quarters. Meta's stock dropped on the layoff news and capex raise. The market is starting to differentiate between AI spending and AI earning.
