An experiment, unfinished on purpose. It may be wrong, broken or unhelpful, and it changes without notice.
The version number and update time above tell you whether you are looking at the latest.
For each big spender: the cash its business made from operations, divided by what it spent on capital equipment
(property, data centres, chips), over the nine months to September 30, 2026.
Above 100% a company paid for its build-out from its own operations. Below 100% it needed money from somewhere else:
borrowing, selling stock, its cash pile, or a partner.
Microsoft
151%
operating cash $160.1B against capex $106.0B · 3 reported periods added
Meta
113%
operating cash $96.9B against capex $85.8B · one reported period
Alphabet
96%
operating cash $127.1B against capex $132.0B · one reported period
Amazon
65%
operating cash $113.8B against capex $175.7B · 2 reported periods added
SpaceX/xAI
27%
operating cash $13.1B against capex $48.1B · one reported period
The vertical line marks 100%: operating cash exactly covers capex. Bars stop at 160%.
The four big cloud companies together (Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta) spent about
$499.5B on capital equipment in this period against about $498.0B of operating cash.
Read this first
- Actuals only. These are figures from each company's filed reports. Guidance (what a company says it will spend) is in no figure here.
- Where a company reports in pieces, the pieces are added (Amazon's and Microsoft's nine months are periods added together). The detail line says how each figure was built.
- SpaceX/xAI: its June share-sale proceeds fall outside this window and are not in operating cash.
- This is cash from operations, not profit, and capex here is the cash spent on property and equipment, not every way a company funds a build-out (leases, for one, are not in it).
Not charted
- Anthropic. The export's figures come from a registration statement, not a filed annual or quarterly report (operating cash flow $6.6B against capex $0.9B). Held back until research-ops confirms them.
- Nvidia. Its reporting periods do not add up to the nine months to September 30 (a different fiscal calendar, or no filed figures).
- OpenAI. Its reporting periods do not add up to the nine months to September 30 (a different fiscal calendar, or no filed figures).
- Oracle. Its reporting periods do not add up to the nine months to September 30 (a different fiscal calendar, or no filed figures).
