AI boom in data centers has top tech companies spending more than major oil companies on capex

The race for new and upgraded data centers to handle the artificial-intelligence boom has the world’s top technology titans far outpacing major oil companies in capital expenditures, according to the Wells Fargo Investment Institute.

Alphabet Inc. GOOG GOOGL, Amazon.com Inc. AMZN, Meta Platforms Inc. META and Microsoft Corp. MSFT — the four largest cloud infrastructure companies by market capitalization — have begun shelling out significantly more on capital expenditures than their counterparts in the oil industry since the…