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Tech giants are setting records every few months for how much they are spending on artificial intelligence — but this time, some jitters are also growing.

On Thursday, Amazon said its capital expenditures totaled $53 billion in the second quarter, up 69 percent from a year earlier, as it built A.I. data centers and other infrastructure. It joined a parade of other big tech companies, with Meta on Wednesday reporting that its costs had risen 55 percent from last year, while Microsoft said its capital expenditures had soared 69 percent. Last week, Google also disclosed that its costs had jumped and said it would boost its spending further.

These numbers are only set to skyrocket. Across this year and next, Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft are expected to spend a staggering $1.5 trillion building data centers and stuffing them with advanced chips, according to Wall Street estimates compiled by FactSet.

“The scale of it is nuts,” said Melissa Otto, who leads research at S&P Global’s Visible Alpha division.

Alarms are rising as Wall Street and others question when this spending can be justified. On Thursday, Amazon’s share price rose almost 10 percent in after-hours trading after its cloud computing division saw its fastest growth since early 2022, and shares of Microsoft, which did not change its spending forecast, jumped more than 15 percent.

But Meta’s stock sank more than 7 percent on Thursday after it revealed its A.I. outlays and that costs were growing faster than its revenue. And last week, for the first time since going public in 2004, Google said it had “negative free cash flow,” which meant it was spending more on day-to-day operations and building new infrastructure than it was taking in from its businesses. Google’s stock fell more than 6 percent the next day.

Even so, the companies insist they are doing the right thing. “As long as we see these attractive opportunities to invest, we will continue to invest,” Anat Ashkenazi, Alphabet’s finance chief, told Wall Street analysts last week.

More than a dozen years ago, tech companies became the largest enterprises on the planet, fueled by their software and digital businesses. But A.I. has flipped tech’s “asset-light” model on its head. Multibillion-dollar data centers, which the industry likes to call “A.I. factories,” have become critical investments for developing advanced systems and making them available to customers.

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Meta’s Eagle Mountain Data Center in Utah. Meta, Amazon, Google and Microsoft are expected to spend $1.5 trillion building data centers through next year. Credit…Christie Hemm Klok for The New York Times

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