Microsoft kept its capex forecast unchanged on Wednesday, becoming one of the first data center giants to hold the line on AI spending, and its stock surged about 8% on the news. The company had earlier planned to spend $190 billion on capital expenditures this calendar year, and due to an accounting change, this guidance is now $175 billion, though Microsoft is keeping its AI capex plan the same for this year. This decision is unusual as most cloud giants have been increasing AI spending forecasts; Alphabet recently increased its capex projection by $15 billion, Tesla bumped up its own projection, and Meta narrowed its capex forecast range, raising the midpoint by $2.5 billion for the year. Prior to these increases, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta had already planned to spend more than $700 billion this year largely on AI data centers. The spending binge has sent memory chip prices soaring, and earlier research found that soaring memory prices could explain about 45% of the growth in capex by big cloud companies this year, meaning rising forecasts have been partly driven by higher memory costs rather than new capacity plans. With Microsoft keeping its capex plans steady, this could imply the company actually ends up pulling back slightly from building more capacity.