some of the biggest public players in AI are seeing some historic declines to begin the year.

Our McKenzie Segalos has more on that in today's tech check. Morning, Mac.

Hey, good morning, Carl. So Alphabet, Meta and Microsoft deep in the red year today.

Microsoft down as much as 24% in 2026, despite clawing back some ground this morning.

And it comes as investors absorb three

new mammoth data center deals tied to yet another wave of CAPEX heavy AI expansion, which

together show big tech taking on parts of the buildout that private companies, namely

OpenAI and Anthropic, couldn't fund on their own.

So first, you have Microsoft taking over Data Center campus in Abilene, Texas, that had been reserved for Oracle and OpenAI Stargate Project before financing talks fell apart.

It's one of the clearest signs yet of how far Microsoft and Open AI have drifted.

They now have rival data centers right next door to each other.

Next, Alphabet, reportedly nearing a deal to provide construction loans

for a multi-billion dollar data center also in Texas that Anthropic can't fund on its own.

Here, Anthropics signed the lease but needed Google's credit rating to get the financing

done at a reasonable cost, which is pretty much the dynamic for every frontier AI company

right now.

They need hyperscaler balance sheets to build its scale.

And then there's meta.

The company cut a deal with Entergy, Louisiana to fund seven new natural gas plants for its Hyperion

campus, tripling its power footprint, though meta is covering the full cost so that rate

payers don't absorb it.

And what connects all three sites is natural gas.

...