Warren letters ask Meta, Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet to itemize AI tax breaks

Sen. Elizabeth Warren and two Democratic colleagues sent letters Sunday night to the chief executives of Meta, Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet asking each company to disclose the deductions it claimed for artificial intelligence and data-center development under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and to describe its lobbying before the law passed, with Tina Smith of Minnesota and Jeff Merkley of Oregon signing alongside Warren and CNBC and other outlets reporting the letters. The request revives a debate over how much of the AI buildout the tax code is underwriting, and Meta is the clearest case: according to CNBC, the company paid $2.8 billion in federal income tax in 2025, down from $9.6 billion in 2024, while earning roughly the same profit in both years and putting $72 billion into capital spending last year, most of it on data centers and other AI projects.

The law President Donald Trump signed in July last year made 100% bonus depreciation permanent among its business provisions, letting a company write off the full cost of qualifying equipment in the year it enters service rather than spreading the deduction across many years; the letters argue that a large share of the companies' AI and data-center spending may have qualified immediately on those terms, and that is what the senators want itemized, company by company. In the letter to Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, the senators note that much of Meta's spending may have been immediately deductible, which is the tax arithmetic behind a year of record construction.

Warren's letter also cites Politico reporting that quotes budget forecasters putting the decline in corporate tax payments at 25% this year, and it asks each company to describe its lobbying before the bill passed, placing the deduction and the advocacy on the same page. The coverage does not say how, or whether, any of the four will answer.

The senators tied the tax treatment to public unease about AI, from higher utility bills to job losses, and the polling has moved with their argument. Pew Research Center data released last week shows the share of US adults saying data centers have a net negative impact on the environment has jumped from 39% in January to 54% now; the share saying the same about home energy costs has risen from 38% to 50%; and the share reporting a negative effect on the quality of life for nearby residents has climbed from 30% to 49%. On that last measure, the share has moved 19 points since January.

Warren has proposed a different instrument: an excise tax on the electricity data centers consume, designed so that "the bigger the data center, the more they pay," as she wrote in a May Time op-ed. A charge of that kind would land on a project's power bill rather than on a corporate tax return, a cost the deduction does not offset; InvestmentNews's related coverage notes that OpenAI has separately called for taxing AI use to fund fraying safety nets.

For most client portfolios the first-order exposure is the four stocks themselves, where a smaller tax bill arrives as higher after-tax earnings and, eventually, in a share price rather than in any line an advisor can point to; the client owns the tax outcome without having chosen it.

The exposure that asks more of an allocator sits beneath the equity, in the compute, the buildings and the power that feeds them, financed with credit and pooled vehicles that have been moving onto wealth platforms. PWD has followed that build-out through the fall, from the fundraise that turned AI infrastructure into a wealth-channel product to the rotation of AI capital into the grid. For the funds holding the physical layer, bonus depreciation is one of the inputs that makes an after-tax return legible on a spreadsheet.

Three senators' letters do not rewrite a statute, and what they request is disclosure rather than a vote; their use is prospective, a public figure for a subsidy that has so far been visible only in aggregate and the base any later excise tax or rate change would be assessed against. If a project's economics depend on immediate expensing, they also depend on the deduction surviving contact with politics, and a long-lived asset is not easily re-underwritten once that assumption moves. The Pew numbers are the other half of the same problem, and they bear on siting before they bear on taxes; every data center needs local approval and a power connection, and sentiment that has shifted 15 points against the environmental impact of the industry since January is a permitting input, not only a polling one.

What comes next is mostly paperwork: a disclosure request with no vote attached, and an excise-tax idea that exists as an op-ed argument rather than as legislation in the record. The number worth carrying forward is the one the letters put beside a $72 billion capital budget — $2.8 billion in federal income tax, down from $9.6 billion a year earlier.