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Tech companies are spending historic amounts of money on computing power and data centres. Today on the show, Rob Armstrong and Katie Martin talk to Lex editor John Foley to try to understand the computing arms race. Also they go long M&A, short free buses, and long cleanfluencers.
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Transcript: Is Big Tech spending too much money? Katie Martin and Robert Armstrong talk to John Foley Transcript: Is Big Tech spending too much money? on x (opens in a new window) Transcript: Is Big Tech spending too much money? on facebook (opens in a new window) Transcript: Is Big Tech spending too much money? on linkedin (opens in a new window) Save current progress 100% Katie Martin, Robert Armstrong and John Foley Published33 MINUTES AGO Print this page This is an audio transcript of the Unhedged podcast episode: ‘Is Big Tech spending too much money?’ Katie Martin Big tech companies are big spenders. Like seriously, these guys are not mucking around. One of the biggest is Meta, the company behind Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. Its shares took a massive knock the other day, wiping a cool $200bn worth of its value off after it said it would spend — get this — $72bn on AI stuff this year, and a quote, notably larger amount in 2026. [MUSIC PLAYING] A few dozen billion here, a few there and soon enough you’re talking about some serious money. Now, the big reason markets have not been freaking out about all this big tech spending is that the companies have been doing this out of their own cash. Well, guess what? Now, Meta has issued a $30bn bond. So today on the show we’re asking, literally what the hell? Are these just like huge spending machines? How come this is all OK? [MUSIC PLAYING] This is Unhedged, the markets and finance podcast from the Financial Times and Pushkin. I’m Katie Martin, a markets columnist at the FT in the allegedly broke, destitute, crime-infested hellhole that is London. It’s actually fine. Don’t listen to that Elon Musk guy. And I’m joined down the line by a little twofer for you here, listeners. Firstly, the big fella, Rob Armstrong, who you all know and largely tolerate, from the Unhedged newsletter. And secondly, by Hull’s finest, John Foley from the FT’s Lex column, both in New York. John has promised to serve full finance bro here today, listeners. Together, we are joined by a love of cheap plastic watches, us three, and by a fascination into Big Tech and big markets. So John, FT super fans are well aware of the Lex column, but you know, what is it, what are you doing over there, John Foley? John Foley Well, Katie, the Lex column is we are an opinion column and we write short, punchy opinion articles on companies and finance and deals and investment for people who have not much time and like me, very short attention spans. Katie Martin Lex, ladies and gentlemen, is the true brains behind the FT operation. So with that in mind, let’s all assume you know what you’re talking about. John, please mansplain to me all of this craziness. You get extra points for very large numbers. What are Big Tech companies spending all these big bucks on? John Foley Well, there are two kinds of big number that are slightly freaking some investors out at the moment after the earnings that were released over the last couple of weeks. One is the amount that they’re spending their capital expenditure sums, which are now running around like, according to Morgan Stanley, about $620bn next year of cloud computing. Katie Martin I mean, who’s counting at this point? That’s a lot of money. Isn’t it? John Foley Right? That’s between 11 companies and most of it is actually the Big Four. It’s Meta Platforms, which owns Facebook. It’s Amazon, it’s Google, Google’s parent Alphabet and it’s Microsoft. Rob Armstrong I have numbers here. Warning: numbers incoming. Those four — Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon — their expected capital expenditure next year, respectively: $107bn, $104bn, $103bn, $122bn. So that’s $400bn, almost $500bn, $450bn worth of capex just from those four. John Foley It’s a lot of money. Rob Armstrong It sure is. Katie Martin That’s number one, people. John Foley And it’s being used to build these big data centres, right? Big warehouses with servers that are gonna be used to train and run AI models. So that’s the first big number that are freaking people out. And the numbers are getting bigger and bigger every single time. And last week we had all of those companies — Microsoft, Meta and Google explicitly saying, and Amazon implying, that they’re gonna quite significantly increase their spending next year. Meta said it was gonna notably increase. Google said significantly increase. So investors are like wondering how big these numbers can get, and particularly in Meta’s case, Mark Zuckerberg, who runs Meta and founded Facebook, is saying that he’s gonna aggressively frontload spending. And you never want to hear those words, aggressively. Rob Armstrong And by the way, it wasn’t restricted to capital investment. They also, these four companies, or at least three of them, suggested there would be pretty significant increases in operating expense, so they’d be spending more on people, on depreciation, which is what capital expenditure becomes when it gets old. And so that’s a part of it too. John Foley Well, also for Meta, if you think Meta, all the data centres that Meta builds, and this is the difference between Meta and its peers, are for its own use. It doesn’t like rent service space out to other people like Google does. So Meta use?.?.?.?Everything is like for it to make its own AI models super amazing. But it’s also on top of that, to your point, Rob, about operating expenses, as well as building this stuff, which comes out as capex, it’s also paying other companies to use their space, which comes out as opex. So they’re spending increasingly large amounts on data centre capacity that isn’t theirs, but it just suggests that their appetite is limitless. It’s just spiralling outwards. Rob Armstrong I have two points to make about this and I’d be interested to hear, John or Katie, what you think about the two and which you think is most important. So two differences between Meta and Alphabet, Amazon and Microsoft. One difference you just pointed to that those other three have a business model, which is will add this AI capacity and we will rent it to other people or sell people, other companies, AI services. Meta is just gonna do something fantastic later, I think, was the basic line. Whatever that may be. John Foley Yep. Rob Armstrong Point number?.?.?.? Katie Martin And do we have to sort of, yeah, guess what that is? Because I’m old enough to remember their whole, like boondoggle into the metaverse, which went nowhere. John Foley Well, it’s super intelligence, right? It’s super intelligence. Artificial general intelligence, you can call it lots of things, but it’s the omniscient, super clever, strangle us in our sleep, super AI. That’s what he called it. Rob Armstrong OK, cool. You make it sound so good, John. But there is another salient fact about Meta, which is that in percentage terms and in dollar terms, its spending is expected to go up more next year by Wall Street analysts and it’s expected to go up so much that its free cash flow, the actual dollars the business spits off with which it can pay dividends, buy back stock, do acquisitions, whatever. At Meta, that number, free cash flow, is expected to fall in dollar terms. At the other three, they’re still expected to grow free cash flow next year. Now, analysts could be all wrong about this, but there’s a difference in business model here and there’s a difference in financial outlook, which explains why, some balance of those two explains why Alphabet says we’re gonna spend a load of money, its stock goes up. Meta says we’re gonna spend a load of money, its stock goes down. Right? (Laughter) You know? So investors seem to be saying one of these things is not like the others. John Foley Yeah. Like it’s impossible to put?.?.?.?Like, because we don’t know exactly how much they’re gonna spend, but this is particularly true in Meta’s case. Everyone is just reading the runes. It’s like vibes-based. So when Zuckerberg says aggressively frontload, and he said he was asked last week, what happens if it’s all too much? What happens if you don’t need all of this capacity, these data centres? And he sort of said, well, we’ll, like the first step is that we’ll give it, instead of doing super intelligence, we’ll give it to our advertising business ’cause that also needs lots of server space and AI technology, which is true. But then, if that’s not enough, the analyst said, what then? And he just was like, well, you know, we’ll kind of grow into it. We’ll just see what happens. Whereas the other companies are like, we’ll rent it to everyone. Like, we are cloud computing companies so if we don’t use it, then you will use it. But Meta’s like, we’ll see. So that’s a bit concerning. Rob Armstrong John, I have questions about this. Katie, you can answer them too. One, if you have built a very large, expensive data centre specifically for artificial intelligence and crammed it full of Nvidia chips, can that be used for non-AI things? Does it make sense to say, we’ll just use this compute for any old damn thing? That seemed to be the impression Meta was giving. My second question is, what is the useful life of an Nvidia chip? And I’ve heard different numbers on this thing. People are depreciating at different rates. So like, if AI is as big as these guys say it is, and they’re going to build the super duper intelligence, are they gonna have to basically replace all these GPUs in like three years, and so they’re gonna be spending $100bn again every X number of years until the super intelligence liquidates us all and flies off to another galaxy? Katie Martin That’s the implication, isn’t it? You know, these things aren’t designed to last for ever. It’s not like the railroads. Rob Armstrong Do we have other facts here, John, that we need to be aware of? John Foley There’s no time for facts, Rob. (Robert laughs) This is not a podcast for facts. Rob Armstrong It’s 2025, man. What are you talking about? John Foley So not all of the spending is chips, right? So the first thing is that about, depending on who you ask, like some of the numbers that have been coming from Nvidia suggest that about $3 out of $5 that they spend will go on chips and related servery kind of stuff. And then the rest of it is like, you know, the warehouses and the cooling systems and all that good stuff. So this all depreciates at different speeds. Like I’m not a sort of chip expert, but I’ve been told that most of them are depreciating over roughly six years. But it?.?.?.?and we haven’t really been using GPUs for AI for very long. The discovery that GPUs, these kind of chips are good for AI, only came about kind of accidentally a few years ago. But for CPUs, which are the less fancy chips that you use for general, kind of like, you know, cloud computing, those often can still be used. They can be used a bit longer than you might think. So you’d depreciate them, but then they still have a kind of useful life for a while afterwards. I don’t know if that’s the case with GPU. I don’t know if the GPUs just like melt after six years or three. But it won’t be that they have to replace all of the capex. Rob Armstrong Yeah. But do they have the equivalent of like my 4-year-old laptop, which everyone laughs at because it’s like so thick and runs so slowly? John Foley Maybe. And the chip cycle is moving really quickly. Like, what if next year someone comes? Do you remember the DeepSeek thing early this year? Which like no one’s really talking about as much anymore. But it was the idea that a thing we haven’t thought about suddenly changes the whole trajectory of all of this because someone’s worked out a way to do something much faster and cheaper. What if a chip comes out that makes what we currently have more or less obsolete, or a cooling system comes out that makes what we have obsolete? Like that is something you have to think about if they’ve like planned to spend $100bn on Nvidia chips. But actually you don’t need Nvidia. You only need one chip by some new supplier. Unlikely, admittedly. But the point is like when you’re dealing with really long numbers and multiple years out into the future, you can get it wrong. Katie Martin John promised us, initially, finance bro. I think he’s serving tech bro here. John Foley Oh no, don’t say that. That’s worse. Katie Martin (Laughs) But moving it back to, I don’t know, markets bro. So maybe this question is for Rob. Like why is it that certainly up to this point, and maybe this is running out of road a little bit with Meta, but at this point, the markets have been like totally cool with these gigantic amounts of spending. That feels like a little bit of, you know, not quite the script of how markets normally work. You can’t normally just throw money at the promise of some sort of magic beans without the market, you know, taking you to task for it. Rob Armstrong I mean, this is a weird, slightly weird thing to say, or I should say argument to make, but you could make the case for any of these four companies — Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon — that they are the best businesses the world has ever seen. Amazon, it’s slightly harder, but certainly Alphabet, Meta and Microsoft, you can make that case. Amazon, actually, Amazon too. The point being, these guys generate so much cash and have such incredibly high returns on capital that you kind of like, if they wanna take a $100bn flyer at something for a couple of years, you’re like, OK guys, whatever you like, because that business will still be there, right? You know what I mean? So if you’re gonna have any four companies do something a little bit risky, these are the guys who can afford to do it. John Foley I think also some of the reasons why Mark’s been very tolerant of this is that AI has actually already done quite amazing things to these companies’ business models. So Meta, people forget this, but like in 2022, Meta’s revenue was shrinking. A huge company has managed?.?.?.?like a company with like trillions of dollars of market cap and hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue has managed to go from shrinking revenue to revenue that’s growing at 20 per cent. That’s quite amazing. And a large part of that is to do, there are various things in that and the advertising business recovering and so on. But also, AI is a big part of it. It has actually generated returns already, so there is a limit to how much spending makes sense, but you can see why people would like more of it rather than less. Katie Martin Now I wanna just pivot a tiny bit because we mentioned at the top of this conversation that Meta has issued something like $30bn worth of bonds. Now then, there’s a lot of these big tech companies issuing absolutely shared loads of bonds, like to the extent where?.?.?.?So, reading here from a piece of ours the other day. Goldman Sachs had previously estimated there’s gonna be about $180bn worth of these bond sales by these Big Tech firms this year. It’s looking like it’s gonna be more than that, but this is already like a quarter of all net new supply of US corporate debt this year. That is something, right, that?.?.?.?This is becoming a really dominant factor in US corporate bond markets as well as in stock markets. Rob, what potential issues does that throw up? Rob Armstrong Well, it’s a lot of issuance into a market where everything is already really expensive. What I’m referring to here is like the investment-grade bond market where the spread, which is the difference between what you pay for a Treasury, which is issued by the United States, a country with the printing press so it literally can’t default and like a high-grade, high-quality corporate bond. That difference is historically skinny. And so if you dump a huge amount of supply into that market, that spread can widen and a little widening of spreads really hurts bond investors. So it’s not that anybody thinks that Meta is gonna default on these bonds or Google or Microsoft or Amazon. I think you could argue correctly that these are actually better credits than the United States government. (Laughs) You know what I mean? It is actually more likely that the US will default than that Microsoft will, but it’s just the sheer supply is my point. Just jumping the supply on the market is a big deal. Katie Martin And when you get lots of what we call supply, right? So when lots of new bonds hit the market, if you are a corporate bond investor, you sit there, you’ve got your portfolio full of corporate bonds. Some new corporate bonds come along, like a lot of them from Meta or Microsoft or whoever it is, and you think, oh, I wanna buy some of that, so I have to sell something else to make room in my portfolio to put that there. So sometimes when you get a lot of supply like this, it means that fairly random unconnected, you know, other corporate bonds weaken in response, and this doesn’t seem to be what’s happening here, but you can get little accidents that happen around there where you end up with little spirals of selling in random bonds that get a little bit ugly. So, you know, the bankers that you know, look after these bonds and launch them on to public markets know what they’re doing here. But you do have to be careful when you’re splurging that much new debt on to the market. Rob Armstrong I think that’s right. Katie Martin So the 15 per cent drop in Meta’s shares after it put out these spending plans last week. What do we think? Do we think this is a one-off, or do we think this is a little bit of a sign that investors are starting to take a slightly more discerning view of Big Tech spending writ large? John Foley I would hesitate to say that it shows a serious change of mood in investors. I think that also included a reaction to Meta issuing a big chunk of bonds, as you say, right? And that made people say, oh, what if this AI capex boom also features leverage, features debt, which makes people a bit concerned. I actually don’t think they need to be because I think, although as you’ve said, these amounts of debt are very large in the context of the market and normal issuance, they’re very small in the context of Meta. Google’s bond that it’s issuing is very small in the company. These are companies that don’t really have debt and you actually want companies to have some debt because it’s not an efficient way to run your balance sheet to do it all with expensive equity. So there isn’t really any kinda, like Meta is not gonna go bust over this and if Meta share price falls, even if it falls quite a lot, the problem, if you could argue, is that Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t really care. Like he doesn’t care. He doesn’t need the money, it doesn’t change his plans. He’s not looking to raise equity in the market to fund this capex. Rob Armstrong He has voting control of the companies and an activist investor cannot make his life difficult. John Foley Nope. So he can just say, well, investors don’t get it. And that’s the story of Facebook is often about Zuckerberg making a decision, other people saying this is terrible, you shouldn’t do this, and him saying, I know what’s best, and being right a lot of the time. So I think?.?.?.? Rob Armstrong But sometimes being wrong. There was a dramatic fall. The metaverse was a terrible call that crushed the share price and it took years to recover. John Foley I don’t think he sees that though, still. I think he still sees that that was all like money well spent on the long-term, you know, Facebook project and VR for example, like, you know, headsets and things. So I didn’t think he cared. Like the risk is that he just, he’s not listening to what equity markets are telling him. Rob Armstrong I would take a slightly different angle on your question, Katie. I would say that this latest earning season, which came at a time when everyone was saying these companies are just spending like crazy and it’s an AI bubble and, you know, it’s tulip bulbs or whatever. This earnings season did show that investors care about earnings and cash flow. And I think that I really believe that, and I think they’re making a distinction between Meta and its big peers because Meta’s earnings and cash flow outlook is both not as good and not as certain as the others. And they care about that. And you can see that, for example, in the price-earnings valuation of the various companies. So I think this all sounds healthy to me. The market actually cares one way or the other about the economic fundamentals of these businesses. So that’s a good thing that I feel good about. [MUSIC PLAYING] Katie Martin That is reassuring. I hope you’re right and there’s a first time for everything. Chaps, we are gonna have to come back in just one sec with Long/Short. [MUSIC PLAYING] Okie dokie. It’s time for Long/Short, that part of the show where we go long a thing we love or short a thing we hate. John, what you got? John Foley I’m going long M&A. Katie Martin Nice. John Foley We’re seeing a big resurgence in companies buying each other and not just like big deals happening, which we are seeing again this week. Already we’ve seen this big deal, Kimberly-Clark buying Kenvue, which kind of sells paracetamol in the US like tens of billions of dollars. But also we’re now getting like deranged shoot-’em-up-style M&A where companies just wildly outbid one another. Like this bid for a weight loss drug owner called Metsera in the US, which is sort of ratcheting attention. So M&A exuberance, I’m long. Katie Martin Yeah. Merger mania. Love it. Rob, what about you? Rob Armstrong I am short free buses. We have an election here in New York City today. The likely winner, although not the certain winner, is the Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani. He promised to make buses free. I think services from the city should cost things. I think making them free, regardless of the economics, sends the wrong message because I am a tiresome middle-aged man. Katie Martin This is your most boomer opinion I’ve ever heard you utter. Rob Armstrong I am. John Foley Is that like how if you give people free mosquito nets, they don’t use the mosquito nets, but if you charge them a pound, they use them? Rob Armstrong Yeah. It’s important. Symbolically, it’s important that you pay so you value the thing that you’re getting, even if the price is nominal. Katie Martin Who doesn’t like free buses, though? Rob Armstrong Katie, if you’re gonna go all pinko on me too, I’m gonna really, I’m gonna quit this whole show. Katie Martin (Laughter) I would love free buses. I am long cleanfluencers. (John and Robert laugh) So earlier today I was on?.?.?.?I was doing an FT event with a UK cleaning products company. And apparently the big thing for selling cleaning products, now the big kind of marketing strategy is TikTok. And there were like people on TikTok who go around cleaning things and then people buy the cleaning products. And I’m like, I had no idea that there were cleanfluencers, that they were a thing, that people are cleaning things on TikTok. Certainly not encouraging the teenagers in my life to clean in the house. But who knew? Who knew? The internet is terrible, we should shut it down. On that bombshell, listeners, we will be back in your ears on Thursday, so listen up then. [MUSIC PLAYING] Unhedged is produced by Jake Harper and edited by Bryant Urstadt. Our executive producer is Jacob Goldstein. Topher Forhecz is the FT’s acting co-head of audio. Special thanks to Laura Clarke, Alastair Mackie, Gretta Cohn and Natalie Sadler. FT premium subscribers can get the Unhedged newsletter for free. A 30-day free trial is available to everyone else. Just go to FT.com/unhedgedoffer. I’m Katie Martin. Thanks for listening. [MUSIC PLAYING] |
