Alphabet Will Spend $75 Billion on Artificial Intelligence (AI) in 2025, but It Spent $69 Billion on Something Else Entirely in 2024 That Makes It Worth Buying and Holding Forever
It could spend even more on this investor-friendly category in 2025 as its AI investments start paying off.
Newly appointed CFO Anat Ashkenazi told analysts to expect a small step-up in Alphabet's (NASDAQ: GOOG) (NASDAQ: GOOGL) capital investments in 2025 during the tech giant's third-quarter earnings call. "Likely not the same percent step-up that we saw between '23 and '24, but an additional increase," she said in late October.
Alphabet ended up spending roughly $52.5 billion in 2024, up 62.5% from the $32.3 billion it spent in 2023. So I guess, by comparison, the 43% increase she forecast for fiscal 2025 capital expenditures is merely an "additional increase."
Alphabet says it will spend $75 billion on capital expenditures in 2025, most of which will go toward building cloud infrastructure for artificial intelligence training and inference. Prior to Alphabet's updated forecast, Wall Street analysts had expected the figure to be just $58 billion for the year, based on Ashkenazi's previous comments.
