AI Is Turning Big Tech Into Capital-Heavy Utilities

Why shareholders may be footing the bill for Silicon Valley’s next great boom

For more than a decade, Big Tech’s greatest competitive advantage was not innovation.

It was capital efficiency.

Companies like Alphabet (GOOGL), Amazon (AMZN), and Meta (META) built empires that threw off enormous free cash flow while requiring relatively modest reinvestment. Servers were cheap, software scaled effortlessly, and margins expanded almost b…