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Big Tech is on a spending spree, forecast to drop a staggering $650 billion on artificial intelligence (AI) in 2026 aloneand that’s just for Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon. The companies are ramping up their investment in an increasingly competitive, high-stakes arms race, pouring hundreds of billions into massive data centers and semiconductors, in hopes of establishing a long-term strategic advantage in their quest to dominate the future of technology. With all four reporting earnings within the last week, Wall Street’s reaction may be an indication that investors are increasingly worried about the large spend, and relative payoffs, from the AI investments. The spending also coincides with mass layoffs across the tech industry. Those layoffs, which were originally attributed to AI being able to do the jobs of human workers, are now being seen by critics as an excuse for companies to reduce headcounts, so companies can divert spending from workers to building and powering AI data centers, among other things. Here is a look at some at the numbers as we break down Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Alphabet’s AI spend for 2026. Amazon 2026 AI spend Reporting fourth-quarter earnings on Thursday, Amazon said it was pouring $200 billion in capital expenditures into AI this year. News of that, plus the fact it missed first-quarter operating income due to the massive spend, sent shares of the stock down 10% in early morning trading on Friday. At the time of this writing, shares of the cloud giant (AMZN) were down over 6% in afternoon trading. “With such strong demand for our existing offerings and seminal opportunities like AI, chips, robotics, and low earth orbit satellites . . . we anticipate strong long-term return on invested capital,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in the earnings release. Alphabet 2026 AI spend Alphabet, Google’s parent company, said in Wednesday’s earnings report that it estimated AI spending would hit $175 billion to $185 billion this year. Despite its recent performance and positive earnings report, Wall Street reacted with caution, sending shares of Alphabet Inc. (GOOGL, GOOG) down nearly 2% at the time of this writing on Friday afternoon. Meta 2026 AI spend By comparison, Meta‘s capital expenditure for AI lags behind, but is significantly higher and more aggressive than just one year ago. The companywhich owns and operates Facebook and Instagram, as well as Threads, Messenger, and WhatsAppsaid it was hiking capital investment for AI development by 73% in 2026, to between $115 billion and $135 billion. For some context, at the beginning of 2025, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had said the social technology company planned to invest between $60 billion and $65 billion, showing just how quickly this AI arms race has ramped up. Shares of Meta (META) were trading down less than 2% at the time of this writing on Friday afternoon. Microsoft 2026 AI spend Finally, Microsoft (MSFT)whose shares were up 1% Friday afternoon, bucking the trend of the three other Big Tech stocksis on course for AI capital expenditures of $145 billion by the end of its fiscal year in July, according to Yahoo Finance. The stock is down 41% from its October high.The company recently reported second-quarter 2026 earnings, including $81.3 billion in revenue (up 17% year-over-year), and diluted earnings per share (EPS) of $4.14 (up 24% year-over-year). We are only at the beginning phases of AI diffusion and already Microsoft has built an AI business that is larger than some of our biggest franchises,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a statement. We are pushing the frontier across our entire AI stack to drive new value for our customers and partners.
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On Thursday, OpenAI released GPT-5.3-Codex, a new model that extends its Codex coding agent beyond writing and reviewing code to performing a much wider range of work tasks. The release comes as competition continues to heat up among AI companies vying for market share in the AI-powered coding tools space. OpenAI says GPT-5.3 combines the coding performance of GPT-5.2-Codex with the reasoning and professional-knowledge capabilities of GPT-5.2, while running 25% faster. This allows GPT-5.3-Codex to handle long-running tasks that involve research, tool use such as web search or database calls, and complex execution and planning across both general work tasks and software development. Codex has reached over 1 million developers, OpenAI claims. And while Anthropics Claude Code has also seen rapid adoption, head-to-head data comparing the two tools remains scarce. SemiAnalysis reports that 4% of GitHub public commits, or new code uploaded to repositories, are currently being authored by Claude Code, and projects that figure could reach 20% or more by the end of 2026. Benchmark one-upsmanship OpenAI says GPT-5.3-Codex now has the best score of any model on SWE-Bench Pro, which evaluates real-world software engineering across four programming languages. Same goes for Terminal-Bench 2.0, which measures the terminal skills coding agents need. Anthropic says its new Claude Opus 4.6 model, also announced Thursday, achieved top scores on several industry benchmarks including Humanity’s Last Exam (complex multidisciplinary reasoning), GDPval-AA (economically valuable knowledge work), and BrowseComp (hard-to-find information search). OpenAI says its new model is capable of taking into account larger bodies of information while working on a task, as well as thinking about those tasks for longer periods without human intervention. In testing, OpenAI says it saw GPT-5.3-Codex autonomously iterate on game development over millions of tokens using generic prompts like “fix the bug” or “improve the game.” Similarly, Anthropic says its new Opus 4.6 model can comprehend larger code bases and make more thoughtful decisions about how to add new code. OpenAI says GPT-5.3-Codex is built to support the full software lifecycle, including debugging, deploying, and monitoring code, as well as writing product requirement documents and conducting research. Beyond coding to knowledge work The same agentic capabilities that expand Codexs coding skill can apply to tasks well outside the realm of software development, OpenAI says, extending to things like creating slide decks, analyzing data in spreadsheets. On GDPval, an OpenAI evaluation measuring performance on well-specified knowledge-work tasks across 44 occupations, GPT-5.3-Codex matches GPT-5.2 while adding stronger coding capabilities. On OSWorld-Verified, which tests computer use in a visual desktop environment, GPT-5.3-Codex achieved 64.7% accuracy compared to 38.2% for its predecessor. Anthropic has taken its Claude Code tool in the same directionto help a wider pool of information workers with a far broader set of business tasks. GPT-5.3-Codex is the first model OpenAI classifies as “High capability” for cybersecurity-related tasks under its Preparedness Framework, and the first the company has directly trained to identify software vulnerabilities. OpenAI is committing $10 million in API credits to accelerate cyber defense, particularly for open source software and critical infrastructure systems. GPT-5.3-Codex is now available to paid ChatGPT subscribers in the Codex app, command line interface, IDE extension, and web. OpenAI says it is working to enable API access (used by enterprise and independent developers) to the model soon.
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HBO Max’s Heated Rivalry, a gay hockey romance TV series based on the Game Changers book series by Rachel Reid, is the breakout hit no one saw coming. With almost no promotion, it quickly became one of the most talked-about streaming TV shows in the U.S. after HBO Max purchased the rights from Canada’s Crave network this November, turning its two costars, Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie, into overnight celebrities. What’s unique about Heated Rivalry is just how fast its popularity has spread, and how devoted its massive fan base is. From the week it debuted to its season finale six episodes later, its viewership grew from 30 million to 324 million streaming minutes, according to the data and research firm Luminate, per The New York Times. The story is about two rival hockey players who fall in love: Canadian Shane Hollander and Russian Ilya Rozanov. It is a slow-burn romance spanning a decade, and includes explicit sexual sceneswhich some attribute to the great success of the series. Writer-director-producer Jacob Tierney has described the show as pure queer joy. Now, those die-hard romance fansmostly women and gay menhave an unlikely new interest: ice hockey. It sets the stage for what looks like the newest audience crossover from entertainment to sports, after Taylor Swift fans found football a few years ago when the singer began dating Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce (now her fiancé). Swift is estimated to have generated over $1 billion in publicity and revenue for the NFL, according to a MarketWatch report. The Heated Rivalry effect Turning to ice hockey, ticket reseller SeatGeek says interest in hockey has surged, thanks to Heated Rivalry. And that could translate into increased viewing for the Olympics. The Winter Olympics always cause interest to spike for hockey, and this time demand is already at a fever pitch following the breakout success of Heated Rivalry, Chris Leyden, SeatGeeks director of growth marketing, tells Fast Company. After the shows first episodes aired, we saw weekly hockey ticket sales on SeatGeek jump more than 20%, with revenue up over 30%, Leyden adds. Its certainly great for the NHL that hockey is top of mind for the broader American public for such an extended period. Building on that momentum, less than two weeks ago, Heated Rivalry costars Williams and Storrie carried the Olympic torch in Feltre, Italy, in the run-up to the 2026 Milan-Cortina Games, wearing matching Olympic tracksuits as they made their way through the crowded streets on the 49th leg of the torch relay. (The Games begin Friday, February 6, broadcasting on NBC and streaming on Peacock.) Meanwhile, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) tells Fast Company there is “strong anticipation for the Olympic ice hockey tournaments, particularly with the return of NHL players,” adding that ice hockey “is traditionally among the most popular and followed sports at the Olympic Winter Games. And in Bostonwhere Heated Rivalry‘s Russian character Ilya Rozanov plays for the fictional Boston Raiders teamsome fans are getting ready to watch the Olympics. “I read the books, watched the series, and went from Heated Rivalry to actually learning about ice hockey, and watching YouTube videos about the history of the game,” Rodrigo Pérez Ortega, a science journalism fellow at MIT, tells Fast Company. I looked at the schedule and the teams for the Olympics hockey . . . I will watch them, especially womens hockey,” he says, adding that “I think in general, a lot of womens sports are under appreciated.”
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