Wall Street went into panic mode about two weeks ago after the Chinese start-up DeepSeek released an artificial intelligence system that appeared to be radically more efficient than what its American competitors had built.

The investors who had pumped trillions of dollars into tech stocks over the last few years worried whether the tens of billions of dollars that tech companies were spending on new data centers suddenly looked like comic overkill.

But the biggest tech companies made clear in recent earnings reports that they believe there may be no such thing as overkill when it comes to new data centers.

Amazon implied on Thursday that its capital expenditures — a figure that includes data center construction and other items like warehouses — could top $100 billion this year. Microsoft said its spending could surpass $80 billion. Alphabet said it would spend $75 billion, and Meta reaffirmed plans to have capital spending hit as much as $65 billion.

Combined, they could spend roughly $100 billion more than last year on these projects.

Executives urged patience. The problem right now, they said, is that customers want more A.I. than the companies can supply. And the only way they can meet demand is to build as much as they can as quickly as they can.

“Whenever I see someone else do something better, I say, ‘Ugh, we should have done that,’” Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, told employees at a companywide meeting last week, according to a recording obtained by The New York Times. “Competition is good,” he added, “but we need to make sure that we win.”