What's up: How Figma made design everyone’s business; Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta Platforms are set to spend nearly $400 billion this year on capex.

Good morning. It’s been an epic week for AI on Wall Street. AI drove strong earnings from Big Tech companies, whose investors seem to be okay with epic capital spending on data centers and infrastructure. Microsoft joined Nvidia in the $4 trillion market-cap club. And AI was a factor in the successful IPO of design and prototyping software company Figma.

This only makes sense in the context of demand. Unlike capital spending, that’s tough to  quantify. But perhaps it can be understood in the context of changing human behavior, according to Cisco President and Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel. Our behavior is already beginning to change because of AI,  following patterns established by the laptop and the mobile phone, he told me in a conversation this week. People use those tools constantly, and they are adopting AI with similar intensity. As usage soars, so will demand on chips, infrastructure and data centers.

“If 20 years ago, someone told us that every human in America is going to pay $1,000 bucks for a phone, people would have said, ‘what are you talking about, no one is going to pay $1,000 bucks,’” Patel said. “And now, the phone is like oxygen, you know? I think that’s going to happen with AI.”

Let’s take a look at how this all played out in the last few days.

Building things remains top of mind for Big Tech, and not necessarily software, as this week’s round of tech earnings revealed. Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta Platforms are set to spend nearly $400 billion this year on capital expenditures, and that includes big, sprawling, material and energy intensive structures like data centers necessary to power their AI efforts.

And that spend is having a massive impact on the overall U.S. economy, contributing more to growth in the past two quarters than all of consumer spending, Neil Dutta, head of economic research at Renaissance Macro Research, tells the WSJ’s Christopher Mims.

It’s not just limited to the U.S. 

OpenAI recently announced it is joining forces with two European companies on Stargate Norway, a new data center that is expected to house 100,000 Nvidia GPUs by the end of the year. The WSJ reports that OpenAI and partners Nscale Global Holdings and Aker chose northern Norway for their facility for its abundant hydropower and low local electricity demand. 

New Yorkers would rather their subway infrastructure get fixed. Can ‘vibe coding’ help?

The enthusiastic reception greeting Figma’s stock-market debut may indicate a hunger for a return to the IPO market of the previous decade. But it also points to the value placed on building good software with user experience at the center. Today where much of the attention is on building data centers, Figma’s focus can sound almost old school.

Figma Chief Technology Officer Kris Rasmussen spoke with The WSJ Leadership Institute about the role that Figma plays in the design and product development process. Read more here.

WSJ: Apparently Figma is a big deal. Why?

Rasmussen: I think the world is recognizing that design is everyone’s business and this is a moment for our community.

We’re a design and product development platform where teams come together to turn ideas into the world’s best design products and digital experiences. Billions of people use applications, websites and these different digital experiences that are designed inside of Figma. For example, if you’ve ever hailed a ride in Uber or looked up directions in Google Maps or even picked content in Netflix, those are all things that are designed in Figma.

What makes Figma unique is that we are a cohesive ecosystem of tools that work extremely well together. And not only do they enable professionals to do their job better, but they also bring the entire team together on a shared page and they become a system of record for an organization around the future of their digital experiences and brands. Read more from the Q&A.

But some developers are not quite feeling the vibe...

Developers increasingly are using AI tools in the development process, but it’s complicated according to a global survey of some 49,000 developers by StackOverflow. Some 84% of respondents in the online software development community’s annual survey said they are using or plan to use AI tools in their development process. At the same time, 46% said they distrust the accuracy of AI tools. 

Among their frustrations, 66% found AI solutions to be “almost right, but not quite." Also, most respondents–72%– said 'vibe coding' is not part of their development process.

Tariffs not technology–and certainly not AI–boosted Apple in the June quarter as U.S. consumers rushed to buy their devices ahead of potential price hikes. Overall sales came in at $94 billion, exceeding Wall Street expectations.

That tariff boost is not expected to last with an exemption for smartphones from reciprocal tariffs expected to lapse and President Trump now targeting India, an increasingly important supply chain hub for Apple, with levies.

Among this week’s Big Tech earning news, Apple was the only one where AI did not appear to provide a boost. Apple has so far failed to articulate a convincing AI strategy of its own and several AI researchers have left the company in recent months, some headed for Meta’s “Superintelligence” AI division.

Chief Executive Tim Cook on Thursday said Apple was growing its AI investments. “We’re embedding it across our devices, across our platforms and across the company,” he said, according to CNBC.

Amazon said Thursday that revenue rose by 13% during the second quarter to $168 billion. Profit increased 35%. Meanwhile, Amazon Web Services, its cloud-computing arm reported that sales climbed 17.5%, boosted in part by customers building up their artificial-intelligence work. Good, but maybe not good enough compared to cloud numbers posted earlier by rivals Google and Microsoft. Amazon shares fell around 7% in aftermarket trading.

The AI boom has produced the second $4 trillion company. Microsoft on Thursday crossed the market-capitalization milestone Thursday as investors reacted to its fourth-quarter earnings report. Nvidia hit the mark last month.

Anaconda, which provides open-source Python coding tools to AI developers and data scientists, said it raised more than $150 million in a funding round led by Insight Partners, Bloomberg reports.

Two enterprise tech rivals, Salesforce and ServiceNow, are in talks to each invest about $750 million in Genesys Cloud Services, which makes AI software for contact centers. Both companies are already backers, Bloomberg reports.

Exxon Mobil is looking at buying other oil companies, Chief Executive Darren Woods said, after losing its challenge to Chevron’s $53 billion deal for Hess. (WSJ)

President Trump promised Africa that trade would replace aid when he dismantled America’s foreign-assistance programs soon after taking office this year. But in Lesotho, one of the world’s poorest countries, his administration is slashing both. (WSJ)

President Trump is building a Mar-a-Lago style ballroom at the White House, a $200 million addition to the East Wing that marks the former real-estate developer’s latest and most ambitious makeover of the complex. (WSJ)

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The WSJ CIO Journal Team is Steven Rosenbush, Isabelle Bousquette and Belle Lin.

The editor, Tom Loftus, can be reached at thomas.loftus@wsj.com.