Google's parent, Alphabet, plans to spend up to $185 billion on infrastructure in 2026, nearly double its 2025 outlay, and the news lifted Nvidia and Broadcom shares in after-hours and premarket trading. The plan emerged from Alphabet's Q4 2025 earnings call, where executives cited compute capacity constraints and a 55% jump in Google Cloud's backlog.
Alphabet told investors it plans to spend between $175 billion and $185 billion on infrastructure in 2026, and the news sent Nvidia and Broadcom shares higher in after-hours and premarket trading. The figure came out of Alphabet's Q4 2025 earnings call on February 4, where CEO Sundar Pichai and CFO Anat Ashkenazi laid out the spending plan.
The buildout accelerates
The projected 2026 range marks a sharp jump from the $91.4 billion Alphabet spent in 2025, which itself followed $52.5 billion the year before — a roughly threefold increase in two years. In the fourth quarter of 2025 alone, the company spent $27.9 billion on capital expenditure, with about 60% going toward servers and the remaining 40% toward data centers and networking equipment.
Bottlenecks and cloud demand
Pichai cited compute capacity as a significant operational concern, alongside constraints tied to power availability, land acquisition, and supply chain logistics. Meanwhile, Google Cloud's backlog surged 55% quarter-over-quarter to reach $240 billion, driven by enterprise demand for AI services.
Why Nvidia and Broadcom investors reacted
Both companies saw their shares rise in after-hours and premarket trading following the earnings call. Nvidia's GPUs remain the workhorse of AI training infrastructure, though Alphabet also deploys its own custom TPUs for certain workloads.
Broadcom, for its part, supplies networking components and custom silicon that connect and orchestrate thousands of processors inside hyperscale data centers.
Source: Crypto Briefing
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