Ep 137 - Hyperscalers' $2T bet (Charles Fitzgerald)

Hyperscaler CAPEX investments are staggering: Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Meta spent more than $400 billion on infrastructure in 2025 and are expected to reach over $600 billion in 2026. They’re on pace to surpass $2 trillion in cumulative CAPEX spend before the year is over. Meanwhile, U.S. telco CAPEX sits at $50 billion for 2025—and it's shrinking.

For this episode, Charles Fitzgerald, Managing Director at Platformonomics, returns for his fourth (!) appearance on Telco in 20 to break down his tenth annual Follow the CAPEX report. We dive into the hyperscaler spending surge, the two big telco AI plays coming out of MWC 2026—sovereign cloud and AI-RAN, and why the gap between infrastructure spenders and operators is impossible to close.

Listen now to hear:

• How AI supercharged hyperscaler CAPEX—and changed the math for telcos [02:59];
• Why sovereign cloud may already belong to the hyperscalers [05:57];
• How AI-RAN looks more like an NVIDIA play than a telco strategy [09:54]; and
• Why Oracle's catch-up bid is a cautionary tale [13:25].

Links and Resources:

• Read Charles Fitzgerald's annual 2025 Follow the CAPEX report.
• Check out Charles Fitzgerald’s 2024 retrospective on public cloud CAPEX spending and check out his Cloud Reactor Tracker.
• This was Charles's fourth appearance on our podcast.  Check out his previous episodes:
  • Ep 110 – Hyperscaler CAPEX is going nuclear
  • Ep 88 - Cloud CAPEX: Not for the faint of wallet 
  • Ep 63 – Ante up to be a public cloud contender
• Is Oracle's CAPEX bet genius or madness? Fortune breaks down the numbers.
• Learn more about the Totogi Ontology and how it's helping Tier-1 operators turn AI into actual profit.
• Read the Appledore Research report on Totogi: Telecom-specific Ontology, the key to AI-native telco (paywalled).
• Charles has been on the podcast four times—one more and we may have to get him a Five-Timers Club jacket, SNL-style.
• Check out this episode on our YouTube channel.
• You can find the episode transcript here.

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This week’s guest:

Charles Fitzgerald is a Seattle-based angel investor, with a focus on developer platforms and infrastructure. Previously, he spent 20+ years working on platform businesses at Microsoft and VMware. He can see the cloud from his house.

Podcast Credits:

• Executive Producer and Host: Danielle Rios, TelcoDR
• Senior Producer: Lindsay Grubb, TillCo Media
• Senior Editor/Brand Manager: Alisa Jenkins, Springboard Marketing
• Audio Editor: Andrew Condell
• Supervising Producer: Amanda Avery
• Associate Producer: Kriselda Dionisio
• Music: Dyami Wilson

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