All three stocks were driven by their earnings calls, where each company pledged to continue investing in AI:

• Meta said capital expenditures (capex) will be $135 billion this yearalmost double what was spent last year.
• Microsoft said it spent $72.4 billion in the first half of its fiscal year, and capex in the most recent quarter was greater than in the previous one, but growth in its Azure cloud unit has slowed—hence the stock hit.
• Tesla says it will double capex by 2026 as it shifts from EV car production to AI and robots. The company also said it will plow $2 billion into Elon Musk’s xAI company, which makes the Grok chatbot.
• In South Korea, Samsung also said it will grow AI capex. “(Samsung’s) AI-related demand is likely to continue to expand, and memory capex should increase significantly,” according to Jefferies analysts Masahiro Nakanomyo and Hisako Furusumi in a summary of the call. “Capital expenditures in 2026 will focus on … future business expansion.” Memory chip maker The SK Hynix will do the same, they say.
• and OpenAI will take $40 billion of new investment from NvidiaMicrosoft, and Amazon as part of a $100 billion fundraising round, according to the Financial Times. Much of that money will be spent on AI data centers.

Clearly, tech stocks—and the companies that supply them with real estate, parts, and power for their data centers—are driven by AI capex this year.

So how big is this incoming wave of money?

Here is a selection of estimates from various Wall Street analysts:

Goldman Sachs predicts AI capex will hit $539 billion, up 36% from $398 billion in 2025. It will grow to $629 billion in 2027, the bank said, but that growth rate will be only 17%.

Analyst Ben Snider and his colleagues warn that the growth rate of AI capex will start to slow.

“While the likelihood is good that some of today’s largest companies have achieved … success, the magnitude of current spending and market caps along with the growing competition within the group suggests a reduced likelihood that all of today’s market leaders will generate enough long-term profits to adequately reward current investors,” they advised clients earlier this month.

Bank of America estimated to have $641 billion in AI/cloud capex this year, up 36%, followed by $739 billion next year, up 15%. “Importantly, we flag (chipmaker) TSMC’s CY26 capex guide of ~$54bn (+32% YoY) is a good leading indicator of the industry’s overall spending appetite, as they are talking to all the hyperscalers carefully and lowering the first $ of risk capital in the industry,” wrote analyst Vivek Arya in a note seen by luck.

Wells Fargo saw 34% growth in AI capex. “The consensus points to a big deceleration (+34% in 2026E compared to +70% LTM), but their capex has consistently surprised to the upside, beating the consensus capex from a year ago by 50ppt in (the last 12 months). AMZN it’s an AI arms race. Ohsung Kwon and his partner said recently in a research note.

Piper Sandler believes that the spending will be huge enough to boost US GDP, in part because of the knock-on effects for builders and energy suppliers needed to service all the data centers that are built. “While data center construction spending increased by ‘only’ $18 billion, we estimate that it generated nearly $175 billion in additional spending—equivalent to ~0.6% of GDP,” Nancy Lazar and her team said.

Here’s a snapshot of the markets ahead of the opening bell in New York this morning:

• S&P 500 futures rose 0.22% this morning. The last session closed flat at 6,978.03 after briefly above 7,000, a new record high.
• STOXX Europe 600 rose 0.26% in early trading.
• The UK’s FTSE 100 rose 0.38% in early trading.
• Nikkei 225 in Japan is flat.
• CSI 300 in China increased by 0.76%.
• The South Korean KOSPI increased by 0.98%.
• NIFTY 50 in India increased by 0.3%.
• Bitcoin decreased to $87.9K.