Big Tech AI Spending Tracker

01Latest Quarter by Company

Latest available results cover different periods for different companies. Switch to the latest common quarter to compare the same calendar quarter for all five.

Capital spending is the cash-flow statement line for purchases of property and equipment. Share of operating cash flow is the last four quarters of capital spending divided by the last four quarters of cash from operations (our calculation); above 100% means the company spent more on property and equipment than its operations brought in. Microsoft's fiscal year ends in June and Oracle's in May; Oracle's quarters end a month before the calendar quarters they are grouped with (its quarter ending August 31 is shown as Q3).

02Quarterly Capital Spending

Capital spending by quarter since 2019. Switch views to see four-quarter totals or all five companies added together, and use the company buttons to show or hide a company. For Q3 2026, 4 of 5 companies have filed so far, so the combined line ends at Q2 2026.

03What the Filings Reveal About Infrastructure

None of the five companies reports a figure for AI spending. Their annual reports do show what kinds of property and equipment they added during the year, and Amazon also reports its additions by business segment. Below, we use them for an illustrative allocation of the spending to computing equipment and data centers, the infrastructure AI runs on. It is not measured spending.

Applied to the $566.4B of capital spending in the four quarters through Q2 2026, the latest fiscal-year mix would allocate roughly $263B to $520B to servers, computer equipment and data center buildings under the two assumptions below (46% to 92%). That is an illustrative allocation, not measured spending or a confidence interval: actual spending on this infrastructure could fall outside it, and the same servers and buildings also run search, advertising, social media and ordinary cloud services.

Illustrative allocation - not measured spending or a confidence interval. Equipment-only assumption: growth in each company's servers or computer equipment class as a share of growth in all gross property and equipment over its latest fiscal year. Equipment plus buildings and construction assumption: the same plus buildings and construction in progress. Both shares are applied to each company's last four quarters of capital spending through Q2 2026. Our calculation from the 10-K property and equipment notes; check the linked filings.

• Microsoft: servers, network equipment and software +$83.0B; buildings and improvements +$44.8B; Microsoft does not report construction in progress separately. Its property and equipment includes assets under finance leases (+$28.8B over the year).
• Alphabet*: does not report servers as a separate line. Its 10-K groups servers, network equipment and data center land and buildings together as "technical infrastructure" (+$61.8B over the year) and says about 60% of that category is servers and network equipment. Our equipment-only figure applies that percentage to the year's growth, an approximation, since the share of the category need not equal its share of the growth. The second assumption adds assets not yet in service (+$28.0B), which can include data centers, servers and offices not yet in use.
• Amazon: servers and networking equipment +$59.3B; land and buildings +$32.1B; construction in progress +$25.1B. Amazon's land and buildings include warehouses and other logistics sites, so the second assumption overstates data centers.
• Meta: servers and network assets +$29.6B; buildings +$8.5B; construction in progress +$23.7B. Meta's total here is the sum of these property classes and leaves out its finance-lease right-of-use assets.
• Oracle: computer, network, machinery and equipment +$29.3B; buildings and improvements +$10.4B; construction in progress +$23.5B. Oracle says its construction in progress is primarily servers, networking equipment and leasehold improvements to be deployed at data centers. The total grew by slightly less than these three classes because other classes shrank, so the second assumption is capped at 100%.

Amazon: AWS Share of Additions

Amazon is the only one of the five that splits its additions to property and equipment by business segment. AWS, its cloud business, accounts for most of its data center and server spending; the rest is mostly the North America and International retail and logistics businesses.

Segment additions include property acquired under finance leases and financing obligations, so they are larger than the cash capital spending tracked above. Our calculation of the shares from Amazon's segment note.

Limits of this allocation. Changes in gross balances are not the same as the year's spending: they are net of assets retired or sold, and some include assets acquired through finance leases (material for Microsoft). The mix is from each company's latest fiscal year, so applying it to the last four quarters assumes it has not shifted much since. Buildings and construction include assets that are not data centers, and categories differ by company. Nothing in the filings separates AI servers from other servers.

04Every Quarter Since 2019

* Worked out by subtracting one year-to-date total from another (fourth quarters: the annual figure less the first nine months). Values without a star are reported for the quarter as filed. More on how we calculate

All values in billions of dollars. "All five" is shown only for quarters every company has reported. Quarters are calendar quarters. A dash means the company has not filed that quarter yet.

05What Counts as Capital Spending

Capital spending is cash a company pays for long-lived assets: land, buildings, data centers, servers, networking gear and the chips inside them. It is not expensed when it is paid. Most of it is depreciated over the assets' useful lives once they go into service (land is not depreciated), which is why heavy spending shows up in profits for years afterward.

The companies do not report how much of it is for artificial intelligence. Their filings and earnings calls describe much of the recent growth as data centers and servers for AI and cloud computing, but the line also covers offices, stores, warehouses and, at Amazon, a large logistics network. The section above shows what the filings do reveal.

Two things are not included. All five companies also acquire some data-center capacity through finance leases, which appear elsewhere in their filings and are left out here, as are long-term commitments for capacity not yet paid for. Figures quoted by the companies or in the press can differ from these in either direction: Amazon quotes its spending net of proceeds and incentives, which is lower, while some companies add principal payments on finance leases, which is higher.

06How We Calculate

• Source: each company's 10-Q and 10-K XBRL data, read from the SEC's public data service. Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta and Oracle tag the line as payments to acquire property, plant and equipment; Amazon tags its purchases of property and equipment as payments to acquire productive assets; this is its gross figure, before the proceeds and incentives it reports on a separate line.
• Quarters: when a filing reports the three-month figure we use it as filed. When it reports only year-to-date figures, we subtract the earlier year-to-date total, and the fourth quarter is the annual 10-K figure less the first nine months. Those quarters carry a star in the full table.
• Calendar alignment: quarters are grouped by the calendar quarter in which they end, so Microsoft's fiscal first quarter (July to September) is shown as Q3, and Oracle's quarter ending August 31 is shown as Q3. Oracle's periods therefore do not cover exactly the same dates as the others.
• Totals and ratios: four-quarter totals, year-over-year changes, the five-company total and the share of operating cash flow are our own arithmetic on the filed figures, done in millions of dollars and rounded only for display.
• Infrastructure allocation: from the property and equipment note in each company's latest 10-K, we take the change in gross balances by class over the fiscal year. The equipment-only assumption is the change in servers or computer equipment divided by the change in the total; the second assumption adds buildings and construction in progress. These are illustrative assumptions, not bounds. Amazon's AWS share comes from its segment note.
• Updates and checks: the data is checked every six hours. A company's numbers are refreshed only if they pass checks (no missing quarters, no negative values, the latest filing recent); otherwise its previous figures are kept. "Figures updated" is the date the numbers last changed; "last checked" is the date of the latest successful check.

We aim to reproduce the filed numbers exactly, but this is our calculation, not an official statement by the companies or the SEC. Please verify any figure against the original filing before using it.

07Frequently Asked Questions

08Sources

• Microsoft filings on SEC EDGAR (fiscal year ends in June; data: XBRL)
• Alphabet filings on SEC EDGAR (fiscal year ends in December; data: XBRL)
• Amazon filings on SEC EDGAR (fiscal year ends in December; data: XBRL)
• Meta filings on SEC EDGAR (fiscal year ends in December; data: XBRL)
• Oracle filings on SEC EDGAR (fiscal year ends in May; data: XBRL)
• SEC EDGAR application programming interfaces (XBRL data)

Figures last updated October 29, 2026; data last checked October 30, 2026. Figures are DaveManuel.com calculations from the companies' SEC filings, for information only; they are not investment advice.