Web Search Portals & Other Information Services NAICS 519290

May 12, 2026 - Hyperscaler Capex Raises Investors' Concerns

• Hyperscaler capital expenditure (capex) growth is likely to moderate from recent record highs due to investor concerns about the sustainability of the growth, according to financial services firm UBS. Capex expenditures will consume almost 100% of hyperscalers’ cash flow from operations this year compared with a 10-year average of 40%, according to UBS. Capex spending is increasingly being funded by external debt or equity financing rather than cash flow, according to UBS. UBS expects capex expenditure to continue at rates that are higher than the historical average to support growth of agentic and physical AI, however, with the rate depending on the speed of progress in monetization.
• Analysts expect the Big Five hyperscaler companies to borrow more in 2026 to build out their data center infrastructure, according to Reuters news service. Analysts at BofA Global Research raised their forecast for the hyperscalers' new debt in 2026 to $175 billion from $140 billion. Barclays analysts said that US investment-grade corporate bond issuance could be greater than $2 trillion in 2026, which they said "would exceed even the post‑COVID record levels seen in 2020." The five major hyperscalers: Amazon, Alphabet's Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle issued $121 billion in US corporate bonds in 2025 versus an average $28 billion per year between 2020 and 2024, according to a report by BofA Securities.

• Agentic search, chatbots that summarize information from across the web, could replace traditional search engines as the default gateway to the internet, according to MIT Technology Review. AI agentic search tools like Perplexity, Google’s Gemini, or OpenAI’s SearchGPT aim to retrieve and repackage information from third-party websites. They return a short digest to users along with links to a handful of sources, ranging from research papers to Wikipedia articles and YouTube transcripts. The AI system does the reading and writing, but the information comes from outside. AI search threatens to disrupt an already precarious digital economy if it becomes the primary portal to the web, according to MIT Technology Review. News Corp, the parent company of media outlets including The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, filed a lawsuit against Perplexity in October 2025 for infringing copyrighted content. News Corp alleges that Perplexity copies news articles, analyses, and opinions "on a massive scale."
• Web search portal and other information service industry employment and average wages for nonsupervisory employees increased slightly during the first two months of 2026, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Web search portal and other information service industry sales are forecast to grow at a 10.29% compounded annual rate from 2026 to 2030, slower than the growth of the overall economy, according to Inforum and the Interindustry Economic Research Fund, Inc.