# Big Tech AI CapEx and Market Volatility

**Podcast:** Bloomberg Daybreak: US Edition
**Published:** 2026-02-06

## Transcript

Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
Good morning.
I'm Nathan Hager.
And I'm Karen Moscow.
Here are the stories we're following today.
Karen, we start with big tech and a big number.
$650 billion.
That is how much four of the biggest U.S.
tech companies plan to spend this year on capital expenditures.
Bloomberg News has calculated the spending planned by Alphabet, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, and Amazon will set a high water mark for spending by any single corporation in any one of the last 10 years.
Shares in Amazon fell after the e-commerce giant announced its latest earnings and plans to spend $200 billion this year on AI data centers, chips, and other equipment.
CEO Andy Jassy says the money will predominantly go to the company's cloud unit, and most of that spending will be for AI workloads.
Speaking on the earnings call, Jassy said it will be worth it.
But the lion's share of that demand is still yet to come in the middle of that barbell.
And that will come over time.
Invest in AI.
So there's a lot of catch up that needs to be done here.
I think the long run narrative here is still good.
The underlying results were solid across both AWS and retail.
And Bloomberg intelligence analyst Punham Goyle notes that some of Amazon's capital expenditures will go toward its effort to compete with SpaceX's Starlink Internet service by placing satellites in low Earth orbit.
And Karen, the AI disruption trade has the S P five hundred on track for its worst week since April, and the risk off mood has extended to crypto as well.
Let's get the market roundup from Bloomberg's John Tucker.
John, good morning.
Yeah, Nathan, this is not unlike that deep seek sell off a year ago.
Investors have been spooked by developments on a couple of fronts.
The rollout of those models from anthropic that threaten to make software services redundant, alongside the eye watering spending plans of the big tech companies you were just mentioning.
Now the tech heavy Nasdaq composite index, now a three percent year to date loss.
The risk-off mood, it it did extend to Bitcoin.
The selling picked up steam this week in line with the unwinding of leverage bets and broader market turbulence.
Nobel laureate Paul Krugman sees a possible crisis of faith in crypto.
I think it's a big wake-up for people that you know maybe this isn't actually going to be an enduring asset.
Well, sell off briefly dragged Bitcoin to a more than 50% retreat from the October peak.
Just yesterday, investors pulled 434 million dollars from U.S.
exchange traded funds for Bitcoin.
And now this morning's stock futures are modestly higher, and Bitcoin is up four percent, close to sixty-six thousand dollars a token.
In New York, I'm John Tucker, Bloomberg Radio.
All right, John, thank you.
Let's turn to geopolitics now.
What Oman said it mediated indirect talks between Iran and the United States over Tehran's nuclear program.
In a post on Exoman said its foreign minister met separately with Iranian foreign minister Abbasaragashi, then with U.S.
MIDI's special envoy Steve Whitkoff and Jared Kushner, President Trump's son-in-law.
Bloomberg Economics Defense Lead Becca Wasser tells Bloomberg balance of power she has some concerns.
And I think some of that is because of the firepower that we have seen massed in the region at this point in time.
Everything is interconnected.
All the trade conversations, all the foreign policy uh and and uh Department of War uh actions, they're all connected.
Former Republican Congressman Patrick McHenry is now Bloomberg News contributor.
He spoke on Bloomberg's balance of power as well, noting that New Start was the last remaining major arms control treaty between the U.S.
and Russia.
Meanwhile, Nathan, a top Russian military intelligence officer was wounded in an assassination attempt in Moscow, according to the country's investigative committee.
Lieutenant General Vladimir Alexeyev was hospitalized after a gunman fired several shots outside a residential building in northwest Moscow.
Alexeyev is first deputy head of the GRU military intelligence agency.gov.
Speaking at a primetime White House event, President Trump said more than 40 medications will be available on the site, including Novonordisk's Ozempic, and Wagovee for $199, as well as EMD Soronos fertility treatment.
For example, a single dose of the most common IVF drug in the country, Gonal F will plummet from the highest price in the developed world that we paid.
The United States was subsidizing everybody.
We paid the highest to the lowest price in the world.
Former Representative Tom Melinowski started election night with a significant lead over Anna Lilia Majia, based largely on early results from mail in ballots.
The margin narrowed as results from votes cast that day were tallied.
More than sixty-one thousand votes counted.
Mejia leads Melanowski by four hundred and eighty-six or less than one percentage point.
Okay, let's update you now on the search for Nancy Guthrie, the mother of NBC Today show host Savannah Cuthrie, who was last seen at her home Saturday night.
Earlier this week, Savannah made an emotional plea to her mother's apparent kidnapper in Arizona.
This morning, Savannah's brother, Cameron, made an appeal of his own.
This is Cameron Guthrie.
I'm speaking for the Guthrie family.
Whoever is out there holding our mother, we want to hear from you.
We haven't heard anything directly.
We need you to reach out, and we need a way to communicate with you so we can move forward.
But first, we have to know that you have our mom.
We want to talk to you, and we are waiting for contact.
Five days after she was taken from her home in Tucson over the weekend.
Time now for a look at some of the other stories making news in New York and around the world.
And for that, we're joined by Bloomberg's Michael Barr.
Michael, good morning.
Good morning, Karen.
The Northeast, including New York City.
We'll get a brief touch of snow this weekend before a frigid blast of Arctic Air pushes through the region.
Bloomberg meteorologist Rob Carrollin has the latest.
Michael, we've got one more blast of Arctic air to get through here in the Tri-State area before temperatures start to moderate during next week.
National Weather Service has an extreme cold warning in effect for the Tri-State area from 10 a.m.
Saturday morning through one p.m.
Sunday afternoon.
We're also under a wind advisory Saturday morning through midnight on Sunday.
So not only do we get the Arctic Air moving in, but it's going to be accompanied by some very strong winds.
That's going to push the wind chills well below zero.
At times Saturday night and Sunday morning, it'll feel like it's 20 to 25 below.
I'm Rob Carrollin, Bloomberg Radio.
Thank you, sir.
Archbishop designate Ron Hicks will officially take over the Archdiocese of New York today.
An installation mass will formally mark the beginning of his leadership.
Hicks spoke at a news conference Thursday from St.
Patrick's Cathedral.
You're going to notice that I will reference a number of times.
The Gateway Development Commission has warned that it must stop work today on the New York, New Jersey Tunnel Project under the Hudson River, unless the Department of Transportation immediately releases federal funding tied to the project.
Global News, 24 hours a day, and whenever you want it.
With the Bloomberg News Now, I'm Michael Barr, and this is Bloomberg Cairn.
Thanks, Michael.
Time now for our Bloomberg sports update.
And for that, we bring in John Stash Hour.
That's Karen NFL Awards night ahead of Sunday Super Bowl in San Francisco.
Matthew Stafford, named NFL MVP, the Rams quarterback at age 37, through for over 4,700 yards, 46 touchdowns.
Miles Garrett named defensive player of the year after setting a new sacks record.
Mike Vrabel named coach of the year.
Sunday he'll coach the Patriots of the Super Bowl against Seattle.
From baseball, Tarek Scuble won his arbitration case against the Detroit Tigers.
He'll make 32 million.
That's your Bloomberg Sports Update.
Stay with us.
More from Bloomberg Daybreak coming up after this.
As markets move and headlines break.
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This is Bloomberg Daybreak.
Good morning.
I'm Nathan Hager.
It is a staggering number.
650 billion dollars is how much the four biggest tech companies plan to spend this year in the race for AI dominance.
We learned last night Amazon alone accounts for nearly a third of that.
At 200 billion, raising questions once again for investors about whether the payoff from AI is going to catch up with all that spend.
Joining us this morning is Parmi Olsen, tech columnist for Bloomberg Opinion.
These concerns you share, Parmi.
Good morning.
Hi, good morning.
Yeah, I mean, um, we've obviously been seeing big tech companies spending a lot on AI and the infrastructure to build AI over the last uh, you know, 12 to 24 months.
So this is nothing new.
Um, but I think what we're really starting to see, and what really intrigues me about this is this kind of almost an identity shift for these companies because if you think about why they're so valuable in the first place, it's that they're asset light, right?
Like they they have a lot of staff and they maybe have some data centers, but then they build this incredibly valuable software and they have incredible margins.
Now they're becoming these kind of capital intensive infrastructure operators.
They're almost like telecoms now with all this CapEx spending.
So it does, it does feel like this is a gradual shift, and we're and we're seeing it continue to happen.
And there's definitely gonna be some kind of questioning in the market about whether they deserve these premium valuations when they are spending quite so much.
Yeah, and it's interesting to see how the reaction is played out just through this earnings season when meta platforms reported how much they were gonna spend, the market seemed to like it, uh, not so much for the rest of these names so far.
What do you make of that?
It's, you know, with everything that's happened in the market this past week, and we can talk about the trigger from anthropic as well.
It's so hard to, you know, identify exactly why markets move the way they do, as I'm sure you know.
And and let's also just point to the irony here that over the past six months to a year, the markets have been so fraught and volatile.
We've had huge wobbles over concerns that AI is just completely overhyped.
And then now we've got this, you know, trillion dollar wipeout for any stock that is potentially an AI's path.
So it's it's kind of like I think we're trying to figure out what the balance is here, and it could go either way.
Yeah, let's talk a little bit more about that anthropic news in our last 30 seconds here.
We had the uh legal tool earlier this week, and now a new AI tool for financial research.
Are we seeing the same kind of reaction in the market to this latest tool from anthropic?
Yes, we are.
But it's so strange because the actual tool is not framed even by anthropic as being aimed at finance.
It's a general improvement on Claude Opus, both for enterprise workflows and for agents and for coding as well.
But I think somehow the market has just picked up on the financial element.
And it's quite, you know, these companies, again, going back to the unpredictability of all this, anthropic, even inside the company didn't know that their other feature, Claude Code, was going to be so devastating to programming and that so many programmers would use it.
Um, they didn't even predict that the latest legal plug-in that they announced on Friday, which was very quietly released, would have such an impact on enterprise software shares.
So again, this is, you know, these companies are coming up with these products so quickly, and they're very productive company, but they don't know the impact they're having.
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I'm Karen Moskow.
And I'm Nathan Hager.
Join us again tomorrow morning for all the news you need to start your day right here on Bloomberg Daybreak.