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This week, industry executives pointed to a common driver behind Big Tech’s spending plans: sharply rising component costs, especially for memory chips, are inflating capital expenditures (capex) for data centers and related equipment.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company is increasing its infrastructure capex forecast for the year, attributing most of the change to higher component costs, “particularly memory pricing.” Microsoft’s CFO Amy Hood similarly linked part of the company’s capex outlook to higher prices, saying about $25 billion of its projected $190 billion in 2026 capex is tied to higher component costs.
Amazon, by contrast, did not raise its capex forecast this week. CEO Andy Jassy said memory costs have “skyrocketed,” and the company is working to keep those costs under control.
Memory prices are rising as AI demand strains supply. Research firm TrendForce expects DRAM prices to increase by as much as 63% in the second quarter of 2026, while NAND flash prices could rise 75%.
NAND and DRAM are different semiconductor technologies used to store data. The pricing surge is changing how investors may interpret Big Tech’s capex growth.
A key implication is that higher prices can lift reported capex even if companies are not expanding capacity as aggressively as the headline numbers suggest. In a simplified example, if a company buys 100 AI components at $1,000 each, total capex would be $100,000. If the price per component rises 25% to $1,250, total capex becomes $125,000—despite adding zero extra capacity.
Under that framework, stripping out the pricing impact could indicate that Big Tech’s AI buildout plans may not have increased as much as the capex figures imply.
BNP Paribas’ table highlighted differences between companies’ capex plans and Wall Street expectations:
With memory costs rising sharply, investors may need to distinguish between capex growth driven by higher component prices and capex growth driven by additional infrastructure capacity. Executives’ comments suggest that a substantial portion of the recent capex increases is price-related, particularly for memory.
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