Google is expecting to see a capex of between $175-185 billion in 2026, approximately double that of 2025.

During the company's Q4 2025 and full-year earnings call, Google revealed plans to literally double-down on investment in AI infrastructure.

In 2025 as a whole, the company had a capex of $91.4bn, which was mostly dedicated to technical infrastructure: 60 percent on servers, and 40 percent on data centers and networking.

This is in itself up from the start of 2025 prediction of a year-capex of $75bn, an estimate that was twice revised throughout the year.

Q4 alone saw the company spend $27.9bn, up from $24bn in Q3, $22.4bn in Q2, and $17.2bn in Q1.

Current spending levels are still lower than competitor Microsoft, which had a capex of $37.5bn in the most recent quarter.

Speaking on the significant jump in capex for 2026, CFO Anat Ashkenazi said that the spend will be "ramping over the course of the year."

CEO Sundar Pichai later added: "We've been supply-constrained even as we've been ramping up our capacity. Obviously, capex spend this year is an eye towards the future. And you have to keep in mind that some of the time horizons are increasing in the supply chain, etcetera. So we are constantly planning for the long term and working towards that."

Pichai also noted that the company is seeing efficiency increase as they are scaling capacity, specifically that they have been able to lower Gemini serving unit costs by 78 percent throughout 2025 through "model optimizations, efficiency, and utilization improvements."

Much of the question and answers portion of the call, naturally, also addressed the projected spends.

Ashkenazi told analysts that when it came to investment, the company has a "highly rigorous framework that we use internally," and looks at "what that investment could potentially yield, obviously not just near term but long term as well." He added that it's exciting to see that Google is "already monetizing" off the back of AI, and "it's already delivering results across the business," including in cloud from external customers but also internally in the company's search capabilities.

Pichai concurred with this, noting that currently "the top question is definitely around capacity, all constraints, be it power, land, supply chain constraints. How do you ramp up to meet this extraordinary demand for this moment?" Thus, the company is working to "get our investments right for the long-term."

Google did not share how its data center footprint and compute capacity have increased over 2025. Microsoft noted in its recent earnings call that it had stood up 1GW of capacity that quarter alone.

With the growing capex, Google has also seen depreciation increasing.

Throughout 2025, depreciation rose 38 percent to $21.1bn from $15.3bn, and CFO Ashkenazi said: "We expect the growth rate in 2026 depreciation to accelerate in Q1 and meaningfully increase for the full year."

Speaking further on this, Ashkenazi added that "the significant increase in our investments in technical infrastructure will continue to put pressure on the P and L in the form of higher depreciation expense and related data center operations costs, such as energy."

Full-year revenue for Google surpassed $400 billion for the first time in the company's history, while Google Cloud had an annual run rate of more than $70 billion.

Cloud revenue for Q4 was $17.7bn, up 48 percent year-on-year (YoY) and up from the previous quarter's $15.2bn. The segment had an operating margin of 30.1 percent.

Cloud backlog, meanwhile, has risen to $240bn, up 55 percent sequentially and more than double YoY.

Throughout the call, Google's newly signed deal with Apple was referenced multiple times. Signed in January 2026, the deal will see Apple using Google's AI models and cloud for its consumer devices, and has officially made Google its preferred cloud partner.

Operating income for cloud in Q4 2025 was $5.3bn, up from $2.09bn the year prior.