#ai-capex · How AI Is Reshaping Work

Nvidia reported $96.2B for its fiscal second quarter after the August 26 close, more than double the year-ago figure. The load-bearing sentence was Huang's: 「compute is revenue.」 Read as a labor statement, it says company revenue no longer scales with headcount.

Alibaba filed its June-quarter numbers on August 21. Revenue up 9%, net income down 76%, capital expenditure up 75%. Eddie Wu gave investors a payback date for the first time: three years, maybe two.

Reuters obtained JLL pipeline data on August 19. Europe's next wave of hyperscale AI sites sits more than three times further from major cities than the last one. JLL's EMEA data centre lead put it plainly: 「Data centres are being brought to where the power is, not the other way around.」

Amazon's Q2 profit more than tripled to $62.6B, it raised AI capex to $220B, and it kept trimming the AGI team building its Nova models.

Microsoft is cutting 4,800 jobs, about 2.1% of its workforce, amid record AI infrastructure spending and a 30% stock slide.

Oracle's annual filing disclosed a 13% workforce cut and named AI as a cause — while the company readies up to $50B to build the data centers replacing those workers.

Xbox CEO Asha Sharma's June 10 memo calls for a reset as Bloomberg reports major job cuts planned for next month — with AI capex and memory prices doing the quiet work.

On May 7 Microsoft sent eligible employees the full terms of its first-ever Voluntary Retirement Program: 8,750 people on the Rule of 70 list (age + years of service ≥ 70), 8–39 weeks of cash, up to 5 years of healthcare, last day July 1. The same memo arrives the same week the company is on track for $190B of AI capex this fiscal year — making the VRP the politest way Microsoft has ever asked its long-tenured staff to fund the GPU bill.

The Mag-4 finished Q1 earnings and the 2026 AI-capex number revised up from a $650B Q1 guide to $725B — a 77% jump on 2025. In the same window, layoff trackers crossed 95,878 workers across 249 events at 864 a day, while ~275,000 AI-skill job postings sat unfilled. Big Tech is funding the build-out by cutting the workers it does not need, and the workers it does need are not the same people.

Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta posted ~$430B of combined Q1 revenue and revised 2026 capex up to roughly $650B. In the same five trading days, Meta announced 8,000 layoffs plus 6,000 cancelled reqs, Microsoft put its first-ever buyout offer in front of 8,750 US workers, and the words 「efficiency」 and 「discipline」 appeared 15 times across the four earnings calls. Sam Altman calls this 「AI washing」. The Washington Post agrees.

Microsoft announced a first-in-its-history voluntary retirement program on April 23 — roughly 8,750 U.S. employees eligible, age-plus-tenure ≥ 70. The $37.5B quarterly AI capex line is the same line the savings are going to.