Citi Forecasts $801 Billion in AI Capex for Alphabet, Meta and Amazon by 2027

The bank says the spending is a deliberate push to build AI compute and will likely push the companies into negative free cash flow in 2027–28.

Overview

Citi raised its capital-expenditure forecasts on Thursday and now expects Alphabet, Meta and Amazon to spend a combined $801 billion by 2027, with Citi allocating about $308 billion to Alphabet, $205 billion to Meta and $288 billion to Amazon.
The bank projects all three companies will run negative free cash flow in both 2027 and 2028 because of the scale of the AI infrastructure build-out.
For the first time Citi put Google’s Tensor Processing Unit revenue into its model, estimating roughly $62 billion of TPU-related revenue in 2027 and forecasting steep cloud growth for Google Cloud and AWS linked to AI demand.
Markets moved on the note with Alphabet, Meta and Amazon rising after the report and a disclosed personal purchase by Warren Buffett, while commentators such as Jim Cramer cautioned that the rally may be driven more by sentiment than fundamentals.
Analysts warn the capex surge is already tightening GPU supply and raising competition for low-cost power and that Q2 earnings later this month will be the key test of whether companies can match this spending with faster AI-driven revenue.