A $4 trillion AI bet, much of it borrowed, and job growth isn’t following

America’s biggest technology companies are in the middle of the largest private building spree in decades. Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta are on track for roughly $735 billion of capital spending this year, mostly on data centers, chips and servers, up from about $226 billion in 2024. Over three years that adds up to about $1.4 trillion, and UBS expects the big cloud companies to spend another $4.1 trillion from 2026 to 2028.

So far, that boom has not come with broad job growth. US employment has barely grown for three months, tech companies are announcing more job cuts than any other industry, and on Monday Microsoft offered voluntary exit packages to about 60,000 employees, roughly a quarter of its workforce.

Billions of dollars per year, mostly AI data centers and equipment; 2026 is company guidance

Show the numbers

	Capital spending
2024	$226bn
2025	$410bn
2026	$735bn

Source: Company guidance compiled by ValueAdd VC and Global Strategy Files

More and more of it is borrowed

These companies used to fund most of their building from their own cash. That is changing fast. Goldman Sachs estimates that AI-related debt sales reached about $489 billion in 2026 by late July, already well above the roughly $322 billion raised in all of 2025. About 40% of it was borrowed by the big cloud companies directly. Amazon alone raised about $53 billion in bonds this year, and Oracle and Alphabet have also borrowed heavily.

Billions of dollars; 2026 is the total through late July

Show the numbers

	AI-related debt
2025	$322bn
2026 (to July)	$489bn

Source: Goldman Sachs, via Yahoo Finance

Some of the borrowing does not appear as company debt at all. Meta’s Hyperion data center in Louisiana was financed through a separate vehicle that raised $27 billion and is mostly owned by asset manager Blue Owl. A Nikkei Asia review of filings found that Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Oracle report about $1.35 trillion of debt on their balance sheets, plus more than $1.65 trillion of leases and purchase commitments disclosed in the notes to their accounts.

Microsoft: more servers, fewer people

Microsoft shows how investment and headcount can move in opposite directions. It guided to about $175 billion of capital spending for calendar 2026, a figure that also reflects a change in how it accounts for data center leases. Its workforce, meanwhile, shrank from 228,000 in June 2025 to 223,000 in June 2026. It laid off about 15,000 people in 2025, offered early retirement to about 8,750 US staff earlier this year, of whom more than 30% accepted, and cut another 4,800 jobs in July.

The new voluntary exit offer is far larger in scope. About 60,000 people are eligible, though Microsoft has not said how many it expects to accept. It is open to employees at vice-president level and below on teams such as Windows, Xbox, Copilot and finance, in the US, Canada, India and the UK. Data center staff and sales and marketing are excluded. Those who accept leave at the end of the year.

There is an accounting logic behind this. Servers and buildings are not expensed all at once. Their cost is spread over several years as depreciation, which rises steadily as the new data centers come online and squeezes profit margins. Salaries are one of the few large costs management can cut quickly to offset that, although buyouts cost money up front in severance.

The jobs picture

US payroll employment grew by just 29,000 in September, and July was revised to a loss of 10,000. Over the last three months the net gain averaged about 50,000 a month. Unemployment edged up to 4.2%. That is not a collapse: the rate has stayed between 4.1% and 4.3% since March. But job growth has slowed to a crawl.

Nonfarm payrolls, thousands, after revisions

Show the numbers

	Net change
Jul 2026	−10k
Aug 2026	133k
Sep 2026	29k

Source: US Bureau of Labor Statistics

Tech stands out. Challenger, Gray & Christmas counted about 166,000 announced job cuts at technology companies in the first nine months of 2026, up 54% from a year earlier, even as announced cuts across all industries fell by 39%. Employers named AI as the reason for about 120,000 announced cuts this year, roughly one in five and more than any other stated reason. These are company announcements and the reasons companies give, not a measure of jobs that AI has actually replaced.

Thousands of jobs, US employers

• All industries
• Technology

Show the numbers

	All industries	Technology
2025	946.4k	107.9k
2026	573.2k	165.9k

Source: Challenger, Gray & Christmas

The wider information sector, which includes software, media and telecoms, has lost about 370,000 jobs since its peak in late 2022, around a third of them in film and music.

What comes next

• Wednesday, October 28: Microsoft reports results after the US market closes. Watch its spending plans for 2027 and anything it says about headcount.
• Thursday, October 29: The first estimate of US growth for July to September, including how much came from business investment.
• Friday, November 6: The October jobs report.

None of this proves that AI destroys jobs. The spending supports work at builders, chipmakers, power companies and suppliers that does not show up in Big Tech’s own headcount, and it may yet pay off in productivity. But it shows that a huge investment boom, increasingly paid for with borrowed money, does not automatically bring broad job growth. If the debt keeps rising while hiring stays this weak, investors and workers will both want to know who the boom is really for.