Four Giants Announced Over 740 Billion Dollars in Investment This Year, and Wall Street Started Asking If the Money Will Come Back: Alphabet Lost 500 Billion Dollars in Value in a Day

Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft have announced over 740 billion dollars (about 662 billion euros) in capital spending this year over the past two weeks. Wall Street reads it simply: data centers and AI chips. Until recently a sum like that brought applause. This time it brought a sell-off.

On Friday the Nasdaq fell 2.9 percent, Nvidia lost 4, Broadcom over 5, and Qualcomm a full 11 percent. The day before, Alphabet sank 12 percent, the worst day in its history, and lost 500 billion dollars (about 447 billion euros) in market value. For scale: that's over 26 times the entire 2025 GDP of Macedonia, which according to the World Bank is around 19.1 billion dollars. On Friday Alphabet's shares fell further.

Google itself gives the clearest picture of the problem. In the third quarter the parent company burned 9.1 billion dollars more cash than it brought in, a second straight quarter in the red, while investment reached 51.4 billion over three months. For this year it expects up to 205 billion dollars, and for 2027 even more. Meanwhile AI Mode, the chatbot built into the search engine, is a huge success and that's exactly why it's gnawing at the business that feeds it: search ads, about half the company's revenue, grew 12 percent, the weakest pace in the last five quarters. Google is paying billions for a product that may kill the goose that lays its golden eggs.

The others aren't much better off. Amazon is 42.4 billion dollars in the red on cash over the last 12 months, against 14.8 billion in the black a year earlier, even though its AWS cloud grew 39 percent. Its shares fell 7 percent. Meta is 2.1 billion in the red for the quarter, announcing up to 145 billion in investment, and Zuckerberg himself admits the new free agent Muse consumes enormous computing power. Its ads grew 26 percent, but even that didn't save it from a 10 percent fall. The only exception is Microsoft, with 18.6 billion in the black. It invested 45.2 instead of the announced 50 billion, says this isn't a deliberate pullback but supplier delays, and shares of smaller firms that rent out computing power sank.

Demand isn't the problem: Google, Amazon and Microsoft keep growing in the cloud. The problem is the price of getting there, and where the money comes from. Not just from profits. According to S&P Global Market Intelligence, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Oracle raised 326 billion dollars (about 292 billion euros) in new debt this year, three times more than last year. The race they presented as proof of strength is increasingly being run on borrowed money.

All this lands in the very week Anthropic filed to go public, and according to the Financial Times, Blackstone told investors the company may not get an investment-grade credit rating. In the Balkans we know this logic from governments that build on debt and leave repayment to the next ones. The difference is that the market doesn't wait for elections: the punishment arrives in a day, like that 500 billion dollars.