Two hyperscalers reported Wednesday and both came in short of what analysts expected to see them spend.
Microsoft cut its annual capital expenditure forecast to $170B from $175B. Alphabet held guidance at $195B to $205B. Neither figure suggests a retreat, but each fell below the estimates that had been set for them. Recent quarters had been defined by forecasts that only moved up, as the largest buyers of compute raced to meet what they describe as insatiable demand. This week the direction of that revision changed.
Microsoft finance chief Amy Hood told analysts that delays at third-party GPU providers would push some capacity into the first half of 2027. She did not name them. Microsoft buys capacity from CoreWeave, IREN and Nebius, among others, and shares of all three fell after the reports, along with Oracle’s.
Alphabet’s finance chief Anat Ashkenazi said outside computing power came online only at the very end of the third quarter. Alphabet missed on revenue and earnings and reported negative free cash flow above $9B, with the stock down roughly 12 percent.
The exposure sits somewhere specific. Much of the compute behind Claude comes from Amazon, Google and Microsoft, topped up by Lambda, SpaceX and Nscale, a would-be public company that filed in September and has since let its prospectus go stale. The assistant has gone dark for stretches this year when demand outran supply. Neoclouds need billions in outside capital and carry no investment-grade rating, so rising rates have begun to push lenders away, and Gartner told CNBC it expects four in five to be absorbed or shut by 2030.
One quarter is not a peak. Hood still expects spending to accelerate into the first half of 2027. But the limit on the buildout has shifted from demand to what vendors can physically deliver.
