Bank of America's global investment strategy team points out that AI infrastructure investment is squeezing shareholder returns for large cloud service providers, with a significant contraction in stock buybacks by hyperscale cloud vendors. Bank of America charts show that quarterly buybacks by Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, and Oracle peaked at approximately $46 billion in the fourth quarter of 2021, remaining at a high level in 2024 and 2025. However, cumulative buybacks in the first half of 2026 were only about $7 billion, corresponding to an annualized scale of about $14 billion, a significant decrease from approximately $105 billion for the whole of 2024. Michael Hartnett, Bank of America's chief investment strategist, believes that AI cloud giants are increasing equity financing and reducing stock buybacks to retain more funds to support data center construction. The contraction in buybacks means that this long-term stock buying by tech giants is weakening, and also reduces the space for increasing earnings per share (EPS) through share cancellations.
