High-tech giants are facing an unexpected issue: global investors may simply lack enough money to fund their grand plans for AI development. Meta Platforms Inc. acknowledged that aggressive fundraising by competitors, including Alphabet, OpenAI, and Anthropic, has made it critically harder to attract new capital.
Meta’s own financial records illustrate the scale of the problem. Despite quarterly revenue rising 26% (to $64.6 billion), the company’s free cash flow plunged to negative $2.1 billion. In response, the corporation raised its 2026 capital‑expenditure plan to $145 billion and announced a new issuance of non‑voting shares, aiming to raise cash.
Other Wall Street leaders share the concern. The chiefs of Broadcom and Nvidia have directly called capital scarcity the main brake on neural network growth. BlackRock CEO Larry Fink admitted he has never seen such an intense battle for capital in his career.
The market reacted with a broad sell‑off in AI assets. Nvidia fell 4.4%, CoreWeave plunged 10.1%, and the tech‑heavy Nasdaq had its worst day in four months, down 2.6%. According to Yardeni Research, investors did not rush to cash out but opted for more traditional, less ambitious sectors of the economy.
Analysts see the scarce funding as beneficial. Tighter capital access will force businesses to spend more efficiently and reduce the risk of a bubble. Forecasts predict that combined AI spending by the big five (Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle) will reach $780 billion in 2026. From 2027 onward, big tech may need to allocate more than $1 trillion annually to infrastructure, relying largely on their own reserves.
