TL;DR
*Alphabet’s contracted future spending hit $811B at end of Q2, up ~$500B from Q1. It covers AI infrastructure supply agreements. Capex guidance raised to $195-$205B for 2026.*
The obligations cover chips, data centres, electricity, and content. Roughly $200.7 billion is short-term. Alphabet expects $195-$205 billion in capex this year alone.
*Alphabet’s contracted future spending hit $811B at end of Q2, up ~$500B from Q1. It covers AI infrastructure supply agreements. Capex guidance raised to $195-$205B for 2026.*
Alphabet had $811 billion in contracted future spending commitments at the end of June, up nearly $500 billion from just three months earlier. The figure, disclosed separately from capital expenditure in a quarterly filing, represents purchases Google has already committed to under supply agreements and open purchase orders. Roughly $200.7 billion of the total is short-term. The commitments cover chips, data centres, electricity, inventory, and content licences.
The number dwarfs the capex figures that have dominated AI spending headlines. Alphabet said on Wednesday it expects to spend $195 billion to $205 billion on capital expenditures in 2026 alone, up from its previous guidance of $180 to $190 billion. But $811 billion in total contracted obligations means Google has locked in roughly four years of spending at the current annual rate. Google’s AI search overhaul replaced links with AI-generated summaries, and the infrastructure behind that transformation is now the largest committed spending programme in the technology industry.
The $500 billion increase in a single quarter reflects how quickly the AI infrastructure race is accelerating. Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon are all expanding AI compute capacity at unprecedented rates, but none has disclosed a comparable figure for total contracted obligations. The commitments include long-term chip supply agreements, data centre construction contracts, and power purchase agreements that bind Google to spending years into the future regardless of how AI demand evolves.
Google is in talks with Marvell Technology to build new AI inference chips alongside its Broadcom TPU programme, and the $811 billion figure includes the supply agreements that underpin those hardware partnerships. Cloud revenue hit $24.8 billion in Q2, up 82% year-on-year, providing the revenue engine to service the commitments. But $811 billion is not a budget. It is a bet, locked in by contract, that AI compute demand will not slow down before the bills come due.
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