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The Stunning Capex of AI Hyperscalers in Context

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Big tech stunned the world last week when Amazon ($AMZN) and Google ($GOOG) both filed 2025 earnings reports and also announced plans to spend astonishing amounts of money on data centers in 2026.  Their big bets came shortly after Meta ($META) and Microsoft ($MSFT) filed their own quarterly reports at the end of January, which also included plans for somewhat smaller but still staggering amounts of money going to data centers this year.  The only one not yet disclosing fresh numbers is Oracle ($ORCL), but they’re scheduled to file their next earnings release on March 9, and we’ve already written about Oracle’s data center ambitions — and obligations — in the recent past.  So what does the biggest picture look like? Do the hyperscalers even have the cash to cover all these capex costs? We cracked open our Multi-Company page to take a look, tracking capex and operating cash flow by calendar quarter and then adding up those numbers by year, even though Microsoft and ...

Q4 Earnings Update: More Filers, Better Clarity

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Another week in earnings season, another update from the famed Calcbench Earnings Tracker. Last week we saw hundreds more companies report Q4 and full-year 2025 earnings, and we now have year-over-year data on roughly 700 non-financial firms. Let’s see what tale they tell.  Figure 1, below, is this week’s snapshot. Net income is up 12.1 percent from the year-ago period, operating income up 21.2 percent, and revenue up 8.2 percent. Interestingly, cost of revenue is up 14.1 percent. That’s a lot, although it’s down from the 18.3 percent year-over-year gain in last week’s earnings analysis . Since high cost of revenue can indicate higher prices for customers (read: price inflation) down the road, we’ll need to watch that line item closely as more firms file earnings and we get a sense of the bigger picture. Within two weeks we should have a much better view into what’s going on. On the other hand, operating expenses are up only 5.9 percent, and SG&A expenses up 7.1 percent. Both o...

Disney, Data, and CEO Succession

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Disney Corp. ($DIS) released its latest quarterly earnings on Monda y, and we get to those numbers momentarily; but the real news came on Tuesday, when Disney announced a successor to legendary and long-time CEO Robert Iger : Josh D’Amaro, who has been running Disney’s theme parks and cruise lines division since 2020. If you’ve been a close follower of Disney’s financial data, however, D’Amaro’s promotion to the top office isn’t really a surprise. Disney reports three principal operating segments:  Entertainment, which includes Disney films, television, and streaming services such as Hulu and Disney+; Sports, which is ESPN and various other sports channels overseas; and Experiences, which are the Disney resorts and cruise lines. One might assume that Disney is primarily an entertainment business because these are the folks who, ya know, invented Mickey Mouse and made zillions of dollars from the Avengers movies. But Disney reports revenue and operating profit for each of the three ...

Q4 Earnings Start Revving Up

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Another week in earnings season, another update from the famed Calcbench Earnings Tracker. We now have Q4 earnings data from more than 320 non-financial firms — and so far, those firms are reporting impressive net income growth from the year-ago period. Figure 1, below, is this week’s snapshot. Net income is up 15.1 percent from one year ago, revenue is up 6 percent, and cash from operations is up 25.1 percent. All numbers moving in the direction Wall Street wants to see. If you want to worry about anything, you could fret over cost of revenue, operating expenses, and SG&A expenses — all of which are currently rising faster than overall revenue, which implies that companies will start to feel inflationary pressures sometime soon. Then again, we still have a relatively small number of companies in our sample size, and the picture could look quite different in another four weeks or so, when we’ll have nearly 10 times as many earnings releases to digest.  Figure 2, below, shows th...

Tracking New Tax Disclosures

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Some of you may have noticed that companies are disclosing more tax information lately, thanks to a new accounting rule that requires filers to break out taxes paid to federal, state, local, and even overseas tax authorities. If tax analysis is your thing, fear not! Calcbench has an easy way to find all this information and we’ve even cooked up a template to track tax disclosures automatically. These new disclosures arise from updates to tax accounting rules that the Financial Accounting Standards Board adopted in 2023 , and which went into effect with annual 10-K filings that companies started to make this month. Previously, companies only disclosed a single number for “income tax provisions.” Now they must report individual amounts and percentages for a variety of taxes paid or tax credits claimed, and do so in a nice table format. One of the first companies to report these new details was Netflix ($NFLX), with its annual report filed on Jan. 23. Figure 1, below, is the new table tha...