Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images Open the books on Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft and you’ll see an explosion of AI revenue and data-center investment. All four companies reported staggering revenues in the second quarter of 2026: Amazon, $200.6 billion; Google’s parent company Alphabet, $119.8 billion; Microsoft, $90 billion, including $59.3 billion from Microsoft Cloud alone; and
Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
Open the books on Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft and you’ll see an explosion of AI revenue and data-center investment.
All four companies reported staggering revenues in the second quarter of 2026: Amazon, $200.6 billion; Google’s parent company Alphabet, $119.8 billion; Microsoft, $90 billion, including $59.3 billion from Microsoft Cloud alone; and Meta, $60.8 billion.
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But Sen. Elizabeth Warren is focused on what’s shrinking on Big Tech’s balance sheets: their share of corporate taxes. And she’s calling them on it.
In a video on X, she points to Amazon, which paid $7.8 billion less in tax last year.
“That’s right, they raked in higher profits, but paid $7.8 billion less in taxes than they did the year before,” Warren said.
Meta got tax relief of nearly $7 billion in 2025, paying $2.8 billion in federal tax compared to $9.6 billion in 2024.
According to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, Microsoft and Alphabet each qualified for tax cuts of nearly $19 billion last year.
As CNBC reports, Warren and fellow lawmakers sent letters to the CEOs of all four corporations this week, demanding to know more about their tax breaks, and the companies’ lobbying for tax incentives in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
Moneywise has reached out to Amazon, Alphabet, and Meta for comment, but did not immediately hear back. Microsoft declined to comment.
Here’s a closer look at the big tax breaks and what they could mean for the federal budget.
Where Big Tech’s big tax breaks come from
Politico notes that Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act includes tax incentives to reward corporate investments, but the tech titans are benefiting most given their massive investments in AI buildouts.
Among other things, the law enshrines 100% bonus depreciation, allowing companies to claim depreciation for qualifying capital investments (like AI data centers) in their first year of operation rather than writing off depreciation over many years.
Last year, Microsoft claimed nearly $12 billion in depreciation tax breaks; Amazon $6.5 billion; Meta $4.9 billion and Alphabet over $3.3 billion.
Meanwhile, according to the New York Times, Meta has been using a tax credit that dates back to 1981 for research and experimentation.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act updated the R&D tax credit to include tax write-offs for AI. Companies can write off things like wages for computer engineers, computer hardware and cloud server costs for training models.
According to the Times, Meta is describing its AI data centers themselves as experimental “models” and the AI chips it buys as experimental supplies under the Federal R&D tax credit.
R&D tax expert Andre Shevchuck, a partner with the tax and accounting advisory firm BPM, told the Times that this interpretation was “kind of wild and out there.”
Lost tax revenue, strained federal budgets amid AI boom
According to Reuters, corporate tax revenues are down 23% this year, much of it due to AI tax breaks.
That works out to $96 billion in lost federal revenue, according to Politico, at a time federal debt has reached more than $40 trillion and federal cuts have hit key programs like Social Security and SNAP.
“These tax breaks are not free, their cost has been imposed on American families via cuts to critical social services and a higher deficit,” Warren and her colleagues wrote in their letters.
They want data centers disqualified from bonus depreciation tax breaks in the One Big Beautiful Bill.
In an email to CNBC, White House spokesperson Kush Desai replied that in fact, the One Big Beautiful Bill’s “pro-growth provisions like full equipment processing” were “driving historic job, investment, and wage growth across industries and sectors.”
Still, some tech leaders are themselves pitching higher taxes on AI to protect the social safety net.
As Investment News reports, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, recommends that the federal government increase its reliance on corporate taxes and resurfaced an idea Microsoft’s Bill Gates proposed: that robots that replace humans pay taxes.
Whether Big Tech will get more tax breaks is up in the air, but the debate will likely heat up as midterm elections approach.
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