The most consequential spending decisions in tech right now are being made by CFOs—and at five of the giant hyperscalers funding the AI build-out, plus Nvidia, those CFOs are women.
That’s among the topics in my new article, released alongside the 2026 Fortune Most Powerful Women list. Meta’s Susan Li, Microsoft’s Amy Hood, Alphabet’s Anat Ashkenazi, Oracle’s Hilary Maxson, OpenAI’s Sarah Friar, and Nvidia’s Colette Kress are steering their companies through one of the largest infrastructure expansions in corporate history, and the capital commitments are staggering. For example, Microsoft is targeting roughly $190 billion in 2026 capex, a 61% jump from the prior year.
In the AI boom, compute isn’t 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.
The finance chiefs steering this race are largely women, and each interprets what that means on her own terms: a milestone, a coincidence, a sign of new kinds of power, or a reminder of the CEO chairs they still don’t occupy. Jenna Fisher, co-head of Russell Reynolds Associates’ Global Financial Officers Practice, says these leaders are cutting against the “glass cliff,” the pattern of women only landing big jobs in moments of crisis. These CFOs, she notes, are arriving at a moment of scale and ambition, not collapse.
You can read the full story here.
Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com
