(BFM Stock Exchange) – The American Tech Giants have announced, in recent weeks, astronomical investment amounts, in particular to stay well placed in the race for artificial intelligence. But the return to these investments is obviously difficult to predict and the market is demanding.

These are colossal sums put into play. In recent days, the major American technology groups have announced “Expending capital”, that is to say investments, reaching astronomical amounts.

Microsoft had indicated in January wanting to devote 80 billion dollars to its year ended in 2025 in data centers to cause artificial intelligence systems (AI) and deploy them.

Meta announced, last week, an envelope of “capex” ranging from 60 billion to 65 billion this year, against 39 billion last year. If it had not specified the exact part devoted to AI, the company had explained that the increase in its investments in generative artificial intelligence constituted one of the main engines of these “capex”. Gene Munster, manager at Deepwater AM, believes that around half of Meta’s investments behind the AI.

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Alphabet followed this week, announcing “CAPEX” of $ 75 billion, when analysts were tabling on much lower amounts (59 billion). Again the company did not indicate which part of these amounts was devoted to AI. Google’s financial director Anat Ashkenazi, however, explained to analysts that the majority of these $ 75 billion investments would be devoted to AI and Cloud technological infrastructure, such as servers and data centers.

Amazon said Thursday evening that its “CAPEX” would reach around $ 105 billion in 2025. According to Gene Munster, this envelope represents an increase of 30% over a year and is at least 20% higher than expectations. The director general of the e-commerce group, Andy Jassy, ​​said that “the vast majority” of these investments would be allocated to AI technologies and infrastructure for its cloud division, Amazon Web Services.

Growing pressures

Ultimately the investment spending announced by the “Big Four” (Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta and Amazon) represent about $ 320 billion, an increase which is around 50% over a year, notes Jim Reid, strategist at Deutsche Bank, in A note.

These mega-investments targeting the race for AI were however able to bring investors to eyebrow. Especially with regard to the emergence of Deepseek. The Chinese start-up has developed models of large-scale artificial intelligence language (LLM) whose performance competes with Chatgpt (OPENAI) or LLAMA (META), but with a priori lower costs.

“Deepseek’s approach suggests that learning AI models does not require the most advanced NVIDIA graphic processors and a raw approach to learning,” said Jalmie Mills, fund manager at Abrdn. However, “it is this conviction that motivated the investment spending of hyperscalers (such as Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon, Editor’s note) in the United States, which sought to acquire a competitive advantage,” he continues.

“It is too early to say what the exact repercussions of this development will be, but there is a risk that these companies must now reassess the justifications for any future expenditure and the best way to be competitive,” he said.

“In the light of Deepseek, companies will probably be subject to increasing pressure to justify their IA infrastructure expenses or could review their spending plans,” abounds Barclays.

Superinvestri rather than undercrust

Jim Reid evokes a risk of “the winner’s curse”. This fairly known economic concept was theorized by three engineers in 1971. He applied himself at the time to the petroleum industry to describe the risk for the majors to pay too much during auction for drilling rights, by overestimating the expected yields. By extension, this amounts to spending too much or investing too much for risky or even uncertain feedback on investments.

Tech groups tend to perceive this risk as a lesser evil. The director general of Alphabet, Sundar Pichai, summed up the dilemma as follows in July: “The risk of under-infringement is dramatically higher for us than that of Surinvestir”.

In a recent note, Oddo BHF also quoted these declarations to recall that AI was “key” for “long -term survival” of large tech groups, “that this concerns the use of their cloud services, the Advertising or integration of AI features for hardware (equipment, editor’s note) “.

“The AI ​​is the greatest opportunity since the Cloud and certainly the most important technological change in terms of business opportunities since the Internet,” said Andy Jassy, ​​the managing director of Amazon on Thursday evening. “I think that our companies, customers and shareholders will be happy in the medium and long term that we continue to continue the capital and market opportunities in AI,” he concluded.

The British example

The situation that Wall Street’s “Big Tech” is currently experiencing a special episode with British telecom operators. The specialist evokes “the 3G spectrum license auction in the United Kingdom in 2000, where, after 150 turns of auctions, five exhausted companies have proposed a total of 22.5 billion pounds sterling, while official forecasts of revenues before the sale were only 1 to 3 billion pounds sterling “.

“It was an excellent result for the short-term treasure, but he put the winners in kneeling which prevented them from investing the capital necessary for the construction of their networks. Technology in the United Kingdom has been late Compared to countries like Japan, which had given up the licenses for almost nothing, “he recalls.

Jim Reid acknowledges that it is still too early to say if the major American tech groups are likely to undergo this “curse of the winner”. “Only the future will say,” he admits.

Nervousness

Especially since, so far, the stock market prices for American “Bigtech” have increased in close correlation with their capex, in recent years, notes Jim Reid.

But “the nervous reaction of investors against Deepseek, then faced with more precise indications on the CAPEs during the telephone conferences according to the quarterly results, suggests that a certain discomfort settles”, he judges.

Microsoft fell 6.2% during the session in the wake of its quarterly results. Its Cloud Azure division had then published disappointing growth, which had not reassured the market regarding the return on investment of its heavy expenses in AI.

Alphabet and Amazon have experienced similar, if not identical, punishment: the two groups have delivered disappointing clouds in the cloud and announced “CAPEX” higher than expectations. Alphabet dropped by 7.5%, Wednesday and Amazon lost more than 4% in post-market exchanges Thursday evening

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Meta (+1.9% after its results) however escaped this poor trend because the company “was able to highlight the direct advantages of AI by increasing the advertising revenues by about a fifth during the quarter”, estimates Jim Reid.