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Webscale Market Tracker, 3Q25: 12 month capex hits $450 billion

Publisher MTN Consulting, LLC
Published Dec 13, 2025
SKU # MTNC20659254

Description

Capex: AI hype boosts capex to $450 billion over 12 months

Webscale technology spending continues to surge. R&D rose nearly 16% YoY, reaching a record share of revenues, driven heavily by Meta, whose quarterly R&D topped $15B (+35% YoY). Across the sector, R&D is increasingly concentrated in AI. Capex expanded even faster, rising 71% over the latest 12 months to roughly $450B, pushing net PP&E up 41% in 3Q25.

Capex has now grown more than 50% YoY for six consecutive quarters, lifting capital intensity to 15.5%. Tech-related capex exceeds 60% of the total, focused on data center buildouts, servers, power systems, and emerging investment in fiber and transport. NVIDIA’s influence remains strong, fueling both demand and competitive fear, including its recent move into mobile RAN with Nokia. Oracle and Meta lead in tech capex intensity among major players; Apple and JD are lowest.

R&D intensity also climbed to an all-time high of 12.4% of revenues. Meta is the clear leader, followed by SAP and Oracle. At the opposite end, Fujitsu and JD have retreated from cloud and that’s apparent in their R&D spend.

Net PP&E per employee averaged $268K in 3Q25 but exceeded $2M at Meta, reflecting automation and aggressive data center expansion. SAP, IBM, JD, and Cognizant remain asset-light as they shrink their owned footprints.

Webscale capex, negligible a decade ago, surpassed $400B annualized in 2Q25 and now exceeds telco capex by almost 50%. US deployments account for an outsized share—peaking at 66% of global capex in 2024—driven by AI-related buildouts such as the nearly 5.2 Gigawatts of capacity currently under construction in the US, per CBRE.

Notes: (1) This is MTN Consulting’s 32nd quarterly assessment of the webscale market, part of a series we launched in 4Q17; our data and analysis spans the 1Q11-3Q25 timeframe, i.e. 59 quarters. (2) The 25 companies in our study include several recent additions: CoreWeave (added last year), and this quarter’s three new adds: Kuaishou, Nebius (Yandex spinoff), and Xiaomi.

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