Inside the Trillion-Dollar Race to Build AI Infrastructure: $700 Billion in 2026 Spending, Stargate Construction Underway
A comprehensive analysis of AI infrastructure commitments finds hyperscalers planning nearly $700 billion in 2026 data center spending, with Stargate construction underway in Texas and Oracle locking in $300 billion in compute contracts.
The race to build artificial intelligence infrastructure has produced a cluster of multi-hundred-billion-dollar commitments that dwarf any comparable technology investment cycle in history. An analysis published Friday catalogued the largest known AI infrastructure projects, finding that hyperscalers — Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta — are collectively planning to spend nearly $700 billion on data center projects in 2026 alone, with OpenAI, Oracle, and Nvidia each operating as critical nodes in overlapping ecosystems.
Amazon leads all hyperscalers with a projected $200 billion in capital expenditures for 2026, a near-50% increase from 2025 levels, with the bulk earmarked for AWS data centers designed to handle AI inference and training workloads. Alphabet follows with guidance of $175 billion to $185 billion, up sharply from $91 billion in 2025, funneled into Google Cloud and Gemini AI model infrastructure.
Meta's $115 billion to $135 billion estimate may understate actual spending because significant data center projects are kept off its consolidated balance sheet.
Oracle has emerged as a pivotal infrastructure partner through extraordinary deals. In June 2025, the company disclosed a $30 billion cloud services agreement with OpenAI — at the time larger than Oracle's entire prior-year cloud revenue.
In September, Oracle followed with a five-year, $300 billion compute deal that briefly made founder Larry Ellison the world's richest person by market capitalization. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has separately estimated that total spending on AI infrastructure will reach between $3 trillion and $4 trillion by the end of the decade.
The Stargate joint venture — announced by President Trump in January 2025 alongside SoftBank, OpenAI, and Oracle — continues to build data centers in Abilene, Texas, with construction on the final of eight planned buildings scheduled to complete by year-end. Despite earlier reports of partner disagreements, the project has moved forward.
OpenAI committed in January to develop community engagement plans for each Stargate location amid growing local resistance to the facilities' land, energy, and water demands — a friction that materialized into street protests across Britain this weekend.
Read the original reporting at TechCrunch.
