Alphabet doubled its capital expenditure in a single year. The Google parent raised its 2026 capex guidance to $180-190 billion in April, up from the $175-185 billion it had projected just two months earlier in February, and nearly double the roughly $91 billion it spent across all of 2025. Now it wants another $80 billion from equity markets, announced in June, with the proceeds going toward AI infrastructure and general corporate purposes.

Technical analysts noticed something uncomfortable in the charts. The RSI on Alphabet shares has entered overbought territory, and the last time the setup looked this stretched was November 2021. The stock fell about 45% in the months that followed. That comparison alone isn't a forecast, but it's the kind of pattern that makes portfolio managers reach for their hedges.

The arms race behind the number

Alphabet isn't running this race alone. Combined 2026 capex across Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta is projected at or above $700 billion, with AI infrastructure as the primary driver. Each company is effectively daring the others to blink first. Alphabet has already signaled that spending will climb further in 2027, so the $180-190 billion figure isn't a ceiling, it's a waypoint.

What makes the Alphabet story particularly interesting for crypto watchers is the company's footprint in Bitcoin mining. Google has extended at least $5 billion in credit support to miners pivoting toward AI workloads, and it holds equity warrants as part of those deals. Its current positions include roughly a 14% stake in TeraWulf and a 5.4% stake in Cipher, two publicly traded Bitcoin miners that are retooling their data center infrastructure for AI computation rather than proof-of-work mining. The logic is straightforward: miners already own the power contracts and the cooling infrastructure. Repurposing those facilities for GPU clusters costs less than building from scratch.

The real test over the next two or three quarters is whether Alphabet's AI revenue grows fast enough to justify the pace of spending. If the gap between capex and revenue keeps widening, the overbought RSI reading stops being a footnote and starts being a headline.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial or investment advice.