The CFO job in Big Tech used to be defined largely by margins, operating leverage, and investor discipline. In the age of AI, it is increasingly defined by a more difficult question: how much should a company spend now on compute capacity it may not fully monetize for years to come?
For Susan Li at Meta, Amy Hood at Microsoft, Anat Ashkenazi and Ruth Porat at Alphabet, Hilary Maxson at Oracle, Sarah Friar at OpenAI, and Colette Kress at Nvidia, that question is no longer theoretical. Each is helping steer a company through one of the largest infrastructure buildouts the tech industry has ever seen.
In the AI boom, compute is not just a technology expense—it’s a strategic asset. Access to chips, data centers, power, and long-term cloud capacity can determine how quickly companies develop, deploy, and profit from AI. That shift has elevated the CFO role: these finance chiefs are not simply approving budgets; they are shaping investor narratives, managing balance-sheet risk, and deciding how aggressively to fund the next phase of AI competition.
There is another common thread: many of the CFOs at the center of this AI infrastructure race are women.
Each CFO views that fact differently. Is it a milestone? A coincidence? A sign that women are wielding power in new ways? Or a reminder that, in AI, they’re still not in the CEO seats at the very top? “I don’t think of this as a story about ‘female CFOs.’ I think it’s a story about a generation of leaders helping redefine the CFO role, and many of them happen to be women,” Friar, No. 90 on the 2026 Fortune Most Powerful Women list, told Fortune in an email. “The role today is far more than managing numbers. It’s about building companies through complexity and change—staying curious, adaptable, and kind.”
According to leadership advisory Russell Reynolds Associates’ Global CFO Turnover Index, women accounted for 21% of global incoming CFO appointments last year across the S&P 500, FTSE 100, FTSE 250 and other major global stock indexes, compared with 26% in 2024 and 14% in 2019.
Women are serving as CFOs “at some of the world’s largest and most strategically important technology companies,” Jenna Fisher, co-head of RRA’s Global Financial Officers Practice, tells Fortune. They are cutting against the “glass cliff” phenomenon, when women only get big jobs during times of crisis. Instead, female CFOs “are stepping into their roles during a period of enormous scale, complexity, and expectation,” she says.
Meanwhile, the pipeline has strengthened. The share of internally appointed women CFOs rose from 46% in 2019 to 53% across the 2020–2025 period, and the share of experienced women CFO hires grew from 36% in 2019 to 43% in 2025. Whether the conditions for these leaders to succeed are in place is a separate question.
Funding the AI future
In late April, we saw these CFOs’ impact during a blockbuster earnings day for Meta, Microsoft, and Alphabet.
—At Meta, CFO Susan Li is helping manage one of the most aggressive AI infrastructure buildouts in the industry. The company raised its full-year 2026 capital expenditure guidance to $125 billion to $145 billion, up from $115 billion to $135 billion. Meta told investors the increase reflected higher component costs and additional data center spending needed to support future capacity.
Last year, Meta spent $72.2 billion on capex, up roughly $30 billion from the year before. At the midpoint of its latest guidance, Meta is on track to spend more in 2026 than it did in 2024 and 2025 combined.
Li told analysts that the increase was driven primarily by higher AI infrastructure component pricing and more data center investment to support rising compute demand. For Meta, the spending is not only about keeping pace with rivals. It is about building the internal systems needed to power its own AI products, advertising tools, and future consumer experiences.
—Microsoft CFO Amy Hood is managing a similar tension between demand and supply. Hood said Microsoft expects to invest roughly $190 billion in capital expenditures in calendar year 2026, a 61% increase from the previous year, directed primarily toward GPUs, CPUs, and data center capacity for Azure and AI services. Demand is still exceeding supply, and Hood has said insufficient capacity could become a competitive disadvantage.
—Alphabet CFO Anat Ashkenazi raised Alphabet’s 2026 capital expenditure guidance to $180 billion to $190 billion, up from a prior outlook of $175 billion to $185 billion. The increase includes spending tied to the acquisition of Intersect Power LLC, a major U.S. clean energy and data center infrastructure developer, which closed in March, and continued investment in AI infrastructure, TPUs, and data centers. “We are seeing unprecedented internal and external demand for AI compute resources,” Ashkenazi said. The company expects 2027 capex to increase significantly from 2026. Meanwhile, chief investment officer Ruth Porat has been steering everything from Google Ventures, to real estate, shaping the policy dialogue on AI’s implications for companies and governments around the world—and the U.S.’s global standing.
—At Oracle, Hilary Maxson stepped into the CFO role on April 6 as the company was becoming a more capital-intensive AI infrastructure player. Oracle reported in March that it expects fiscal 2026 revenue of $67 billion and capex of $50 billion, more than double its FY2025 capex of about $21.2 billion. It also raised its fiscal 2027 revenue guidance to $90 billion. As Oracle expands cloud infrastructure to meet AI demand, the CFO job is no longer just about financial stewardship. It is about managing the trade-offs of a capital-intensive bet on the future.
When compute becomes strategy
OpenAI offers a different version of the same story. As a private company, it does not publish formal capex guidance, but the Stargate initiative announced in January 2025 outlined a plan to invest up to $500 billion over roughly four years to build large-scale AI infrastructure in the U.S.—with the initial phase targeting about $100 billion and the broader buildout now accelerating toward a 10-gigawatt capacity goal in the U.S. by 2029. Just over a year later, it has already surpassed that milestone, as demand for AI continues to accelerate. OpenAI’s IPO could come as soon as this summer or as late as 2027, according to reports. The company is already valued at $852 billion and approaching the $1 trillion range.
“At OpenAI, our mission is to make sure AGI benefits all of humanity,” Friar said. “That means building systems that are not just powerful, but useful, broadly accessible, and widely trusted.”
Nvidia CFO Colette Kress sits on the other side of the buildout. Nvidia is not spending like the hyperscalers to construct data centers at the same scale. Instead, it profits from the AI infrastructure boom by supplying the GPUs, networking, systems, and software stack that power those data centers.
In fiscal year 2026, Nvidia reported $6 billion in purchases of property and equipment and intangible assets, a much smaller investment footprint than many of its hyperscaler customers. Those hyperscaler investments, however, are a major driver of Nvidia’s growth.
On Nvidia’s Q4 FY2026 earnings call, Kress said hyperscalers remained the largest customer segment for the company’s data center business, accounting for about 50% of revenue. She also pointed to rising demand from AI startups, enterprises, and sovereign customers, suggesting AI infrastructure spending is broadening beyond traditional cloud giants.
That customer base has helped support Nvidia’s position as a central player in the AI buildout, reflected in its roughly $4.8 trillion market capitalization.
CFO skills
Boards increasingly want CFOs who can be strong storytellers with investors, credible partners to CEOs, and architects of transformation
“A great AI CFO needs technical fluency, commercial judgment, and operational discipline,” Friar said. “The job is to connect the pace of innovation to capital allocation, pricing, and governance, so the company can scale at extraordinary speed while staying grounded in its mission and responsibilities.”
The CEO gap remains
Even as women have become more visible in some of the most strategically important finance roles in tech, the top CEO roles at major AI companies remain predominantly held by men.
The AI infrastructure race is testing a new version of the CFO role: part capital allocator, part investor storyteller, part transformation leader. For Li, Hood, Ashkenazi, Maxson, Friar, and Kress, the job is not only to fund AI ambition, but to help convince markets that historic levels of spending will translate into durable returns.
Recent Comments