Microsoft kept its capital spending forecast unchanged on Wednesday, becoming one of the first data center giants to maintain control of the industry’s rampant AI spending.

Shares rose about 8% on the news.

Earlier this year, the company said it planned to spend $190 billion on capital expenditures this calendar year.

On Wednesday’s earnings call, Microsoft held this spending forecast steady. Due to an accounting change, this capital spending guidance is now $175 billion. However, in reality, Microsoft maintains its AI investment plan for this year.

The decision to keep a lid on capital spending is unusual. Most cloud giants have steadily increased their AI spending forecasts as they compete with each other to capture a large share of this fast-growing market.

However, investors are increasingly concerned about the returns on these huge investments. That has led some on Wall Street to wonder whether the tech giants would blink during this earnings season.

Alphabet recently raised its capital spending guidance by $15 billion. Tesla also raised its own projection. Both stocks fell sharply last week on the news, as investors punished plans for higher spending. And on Wednesday, Meta lowered its own capital spending forecast range, raising the midpoint by $2.5 billion for the year.

Even before Alphabet’s forecast increase, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta had already presented plans to spend more than 700 billion dollars this year largely in AI data centers.

That excess spending has driven up the price of memory chips this year. Memory is a major part of data center costs, so these increases have made it more expensive to build AI capacity.

This means that rising AI investment forecasts have been driven, at least in part, by higher memory costs, rather than new plans to build more capacity.

Previous research found that skyrocketing memory prices could explain about 45% of the capital spending growth of large cloud companies this year.

So, with Microsoft keeping its capital spending plans stable, this could mean the company ends up backing off slightly on building more capacity.

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