Charticle: AI Giants and Capex Spending

One important measure of macro-economic health is “capex” spending — that is, capital expenditures that companies make to acquire or maintain physical assets. Capex could be anything from property to hardware technology to manufacturing equipment; and the logic is that the more companies spend on capex, the better a sign it is that companies are bullish on their long-term growth. 

At first glance, capex spending seems pretty good these days. According to the Calcbench Earnings Tracker, capex spending in Q2 2025 was up 16.9 percent from the year-earlier period. That means everything’s good, right? 

Upon digging into the data, the answer is more complex.

Figure 1, below, companies capex spending among four tech giants investing heavily in artificial intelligence against the rest of the S&P 500. As you can see, those four firms — Google ($GOOG), Microsoft ($MSFT), Amazon ($AMZN) and Facebook ($META) — account for a significant fraction of all capex spending for the entire S&P 500.  

Indeed, capex among those four tech giants has soared 117 percent in the last 10 quarters, from $32.79 billion at the start of 2023 to $71.14 billion in Q2 of this year. Meanwhile, capex spending for the rest of the S&P 500 only rose 16 percent, from $186.82 billion to $217.21 billion.

Or consider this fun fact: when you rank the S&P 500 by biggest capex spenders, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google have been the three biggest spenders for eight of the last nine quarters. 

Figure 2, below, shows the capex spend of the four tech giants as a percent of all S&P 500 capex spending for the same previous 10 quarters. 

Amazon in particular has been the single biggest capex spender since the start of 2023. Microsoft and Google then usually jockeyed for second or third place, although Meta snuck into third place in Q4 2024 (knocking Google down to fourth place). 

The Cause: Artificial Intelligence

The reason for all this capex spending is, of course, artificial intelligence: billions and billions spent on data centers, computer servers, networking cables, backup power sources, and all the rest. The biggest spenders in artificial intelligence are Google, Microsoft (in partnership with OpenAI), Facebook (with its Llama model), and Amazon. Most of that money is going to capex.

To some extent all this AI spending is welcome; just today, the New York Times had an article exploring how the AI spending boom is driving other, ancillary spending booms too and lifting economic growth overall. 

Then again, maybe not. Business Insider had an article last week wondering whether all this AI spending will pay off for the tech giants — and reviewing prior examples of big capex spenders who couldn’t reap promised returns, and then saw their share prices underperform for years. 

For yet another view, several weeks ago the Wall Street Journal explored how the AI spending boom is changing the very nature of the tech giants, shifting them from asset-light companies to asset-heavy ones. You can see it in the divergence of their net income and free cash flow, which historically had moved in tandem every quarter but started moving in different directions in early 2023 — just as ChatGPT and other large language models took off and the AI capex arms race began.

Tracking It in Calcbench

Well of course you can track all this in Calcbench! For example, capex is one of the many standardized metrics you can track on our Multi-Company page, if you’d like to see capex spending for a group of companies and look back at spending in prior periods. 

You can also track capex spending via our Bulk Data Query page, if you want to track one company, many companies, or groups of companies in aggregate. Just look on the right-hand side of the page, where we offer data points related to the statement of cash flows. Under the “Investing” section you’ll have the choice of tracking either gross or net capex spending. (Net capex spend accounts for any capital equipment a company might have sold off in the quarter, which is deducted from gross capex.) 

Or you can use the Company-in-Detail page, which examines the financial statements of individual companies. Call up the company you want to study, select the statement of cash flows, and then look under the Investing section for something like “Purchases related to property and equipment.” 

Figure 3, below, shows the capex spending for Nvidia ($NVDA), which just filed its latest quarterly earnings release this afternoon. The line-item in blue is capex spending. 

 

Anyway, back to our original point: yes, capex spending is booming right now, but that’s almost exclusively due to the astonishing amount of spending from a tiny group of tech companies going like gangbusters for AI. 

Will it pay off? We don’t know. But Calcbench does have the data to let you see the question and ponder the answer yourself.