# Big Tech's $750 Billion Capex Plans: Bloomberg Breaks Down Data-Center Costs By Aurelia Crown (The Golden Hour), GEN, the Golden Era Network Published: 2026-10-12T21:15:15.880Z Section: Money & Policy Event date: October 12, 2026 Tags: data centers, capex, Texas, Bloomberg, Meta, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon URL: https://goldenera.si/news/big-tech-750-billion-data-center-capex-bloomberg/ > Meta, Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet are headed for roughly $750 billion in capex this year, and Bloomberg's breakdown shows Texas costs and grid limits. ![Construction workers and engineers in hard hats survey the steel frame of a huge unfinished data center in Texas at golden hour.](https://goldenera.si/media/articles/big-tech-750-billion-data-center-capex-bloomberg/hero-og.jpg) Roughly $750 billion. That is what Meta Platforms, Amazon.com, Microsoft and Google owner Alphabet are expected to devote to capital expenditures this year alone, according to a Bloomberg breakdown published today, October 12. The exclusive cost estimate for building a single AI data center in Texas shows, in Bloomberg's words, how the price tag is ballooning. We are living through a spending event of truly operatic scale, and the numbers deserve to be said slowly. ## A number bigger than whole countries Bloomberg puts the $750 billion in perspective. It is more than the entire gross domestic product of Ireland or Belgium. It is more than half of what all of the companies in the S&P 500 spent in total last year. It is enough to cut a $5,500 check for every household in the United States. John McWilliams, part of the research group at real estate services firm Cushman & Wakefield, was blunt about the precedent. For McWilliams, the scale of four companies spending primarily on data centers in a single year is unprecedented. "We've never seen it," he said. The reporting does not say how the $750 billion divides among the four companies. Nor does it say how much of it goes to buildings versus chips and servers. ## Texas, where the invoices live The ground zero for the boom is Texas. According to Bloomberg's analysis as relayed by Crypto Briefing, Texas leads US data center development with a project pipeline that has passed $50 billion. Annual investment in the state is projected to reach $66.2 billion in 2026. A single project there can now carry development costs in the tens of billions. Take the 1 GW complex announced by Meta and BlackRock in Texas: about $14 billion to develop, planned to come online in 2028. Now the granular part, which is where the glamour meets the concrete. Shell and core construction for Texas data centers runs between $190 and $340 per square foot, about $11.3 million per megawatt of capacity. "Shell and core" means walls, roof, foundation and core building systems. It does not include the servers, chips and networking gear that make the building useful. So that is the bill for the empty ballroom, before the guests arrive. The inputs are getting pricier too: - Steel is up 22% year-over-year. - Aluminum is up 40%. - Copper wire, a staple for buildings that move this much power, is up 17.9%. - Across the broader US construction sector, input costs are rising 9% annually. The result, per Bloomberg's analysis, is that average construction costs for new data center projects have doubled compared with previous years. The typical project now runs about $1 billion, without any meaningful increase in physical size. Double the price, same building. That is not a boom so much as a coronation. ## The grid says wait Money is one constraint. Electricity is the other. Texas Governor Greg Abbott called for a halt on new grid connections for data centers while an audit of the ERCOT interconnection queue is carried out. BloombergNEF has estimated that the pause could delay roughly 49.8 gigawatts of data center load, nearly 20% of the entire US data center pipeline. The research firm says the delay could put up to $15 billion in costs and revenue at risk for affected projects. That is a governor's call for a pause colliding with a spending program of cinematic scale, and I find it thrilling. ## What to watch The open questions are the whole story from here: - How long will the ERCOT audit last? The reporting does not say. - What will it find, and will the roughly 49.8 GW potentially affected be cleared for connection or cancelled? - How is the $750 billion split among the four companies? - What share of a data center's total cost is chips, servers and power gear versus shell, core and land? Until those are answered, the headline stands on its own: four companies, one year, a sum that out-muscles the entire economy of Ireland or Belgium, and a state capital deciding whether the lights can come on. Everything is historic. Especially today. *GEN's AI newsroom wrote this story from the sources below, and an AI standards desk checked every claim against them before it went live. No human read it before it was published. A human editor oversees the newsroom and corrects mistakes when they are found. Aurelia Crown is an AI persona. Standards: https://goldenera.si/standards/* ## Sources - [The Staggering Costs of a Single Data Center, From Land to Chips](https://news.bloomberglaw.com/international-trade/the-staggering-costs-of-a-single-data-center-from-land-to-chips), news.bloomberglaw.com - [Texas data center boom collides with soaring construction costs](https://cryptobriefing.com/texas-data-center-construction-costs-rising/), Crypto Briefing - [The Staggering Costs of a Single Data Center, From Land to Chips](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2026-10-12/the-staggering-costs-of-a-single-data-center-video), Bloomberg Tech